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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.