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

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.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Frost isn’t exactly despised but not enough people have worked out what a brilliant poet he was.

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

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.