I hardly ever look at my published books.

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.

The gap between verse and poetry is enormous. Between good poetry and good prose the gap is much narrower

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.

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.