My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers. And those who disdained free verse would always be open to accusations of elitism, mandarinism. Open form was like common ground on which all might graze their cattle - it was not to be closed in by usurping landlords.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

I prefer writing in the mornings, so to that extent I have a routine. I do reading and other things in the afternoon.