For whatever reason, people, including very well-educated people or people otherwise interested in reading, do not read poetry

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

Living at that pitch, on that edge, is something which many poets engage in to some extent.

What I try to do is to go into a poem - and one writes them, of course, poem by poem - to go into each poem, first of all without having any sense whatsoever of where it's going to end up

If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.

Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.