"I haven't done research for any specific poem, but my writing is not separate from my life; and I have spent my entire life doing research (if you want to put it that way) in order to answer all the fundamental questions we ask about ourselves in the first place, starting with the existential questions like "who am I?" But that, of course, inevitably leads into "who are we?" And that, in turn, leads into "where are we coming from?" And it seems to me that this is my engagement, which is an engagement with history-both a personal and an ancestral history, but also with a wider notion of history: the history of the Caribbean, and indeed of the so-called New World."