I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

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

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

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 hardly ever look at my published books.

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