There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.

But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.