For me, poetry is the music of being human. And also a time machine by which we can travel to who we are and to who we will become.

I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.

My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy

When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.

Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.

Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.

Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.