I don't know where the shape of a poem comes from. I certainly don't impose it. I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.

I do feel that a poem needs not just space, but, ideally, space around that space - space for meditation, reverie, subliminal link-ups. I sense that poetry happens at a level above or below intelligence. It doesn't come into being at a purely rational level.

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

Of course, when a poem is being born, the reasoning part of the brain throbs away at full throttle, but all the other areas are overlapping and interacting as well, the emotional, intuitive, animal areas.