I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

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.

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that.

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.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

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

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