I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.