There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.

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.

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.

Did you love well what you very soon left? Come home and take me in your arms and take away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me.