There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

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.

I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy.

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

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

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

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.