Good writing gives energy, whatever it is about.

Perhaps first and foremost is the challenge of taking what I find as a reader and making it into a poem that, primarily, has to be a plausible poem in English.

As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

i'm alternatingly brilliant and witless-and sleepless: bed is just a swamp to roll in.

Translation makes me look at how a poem is put together in a different way, without the personal investment of the poem I'm writing myself, but equally closely technically.

I don't know whether a poem has be there to help to develop something. I think it's there for itself, for what the reader finds in it.