[laughs]

And, uh, um, so I think that, uh, um, there was obviously something going on, uh, in the minds and hearts of those monks that wasn't, um, apparent in the general social round.

There were a lot of other, other, you know, quite warm, uh, human, uh, h- human faculties on display in, in Yorkshire community.

It's a very communal place.

But there was something that was an invitation to some other invisible world that was both deep inside a person but also far beyond you at the same time.

So, um, and it was rather remarkable, uh, many, many years later when I came to, uh, to run an American, um, an American, uh, study abroad program in Oxford, when the room I found for my students in which to have their lectures, um, belonged to, um, St.

Cross College, and around the walls were, were black-and-white photographs of all of the fathers that I had known when I was a child at the House of the Resurrection.

[laughs]

... to, to approach that mystery.

Well, poetry, I always say good poetry is the thing itself.

It's not about something.

Bad poetry is not the thing itself.

There, there's a lot of bad poetry.

[laughs] That's because it's not good poetry.

And good poetry is language against which we have no defenses, so in which past and present and, and this and that start to meld together.

[laughs]

Can you just take us through the birth of a poem? Does it start with an image, a phrase, a rhythm, a question, an experience? What is the act of insemination or conception of a poem?

Well, there are lots of different ways.

Some of them you start in and it's a long process, word by word, line by line.

But often if I've been working for a year or so and I'm starting to get into that period toward the end of a cycle of poetry where I'm writing for six, seven, eight hours a day, sometimes longer even, then whole poems start to be born.

And as you're in the rhythm, you're at the edge, you're in the particular cycle of articulation and everything starts to flow.

I can give you a wonderful story about one particular poem, which is called A Seeming Stillness.

And I wrote it, started it in the city of Granada in Spain, where I've often gone to write.

paper.