That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.

I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort - this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn't that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?

Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.