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.

In America, where you'd have thought the country's so huge it couldn't happen quite so cosily, everyone's giving his imprimatur to everyone else. You line up three or four well-known poets and a couple of eminent academics on the dustjacket, and the rest of academe follow like sheep. That's death really, if you take pleasure in it. Mind you, the occasional puff's hard to resist, but you shouldn't inhale.

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.

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 think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

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.