Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.