We simply have not kept in touch with poetry

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

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

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

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.

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.

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