Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

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.

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 suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

I do a lot of readings.

We simply have not kept in touch with poetry

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