Well, I had this little notion – I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it it was my great refuge through adolescence. – Harry Mathews
My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. Im not kidding. – Harry Mathews
Well, the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words, that is to say, the distance between what they say theyre saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest. – Harry Mathews
Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing. It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for transformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift. – Harry Mathews
But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. – Chinua Achebe