And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.

All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.

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.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

People haven't got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.