A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.

The number of people writing poems is vast, and their reasons for doing so are many, that much can be surmised from the stacks of submissions.

It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape.

The reality of a poem is a very ghostly one. It suggests, it suggests, it suggests again.

But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving.

Even this late it happens: the coming of love, the coming of light.

We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention.