If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way.

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself.

I suppose I'm saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job

Once I was on the job, once I had got started, I felt safe enough, but the anticipation made me tense.

Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heart and time to go. The sea-nymphs in the spray will be the chorus now. What’s left to say? Suspect too much sweet-talk but never close your mind. It was a fortunate wind that blew me here. I leave half-ready to believe that a crippled trust might walk and the half-true rhyme is love.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

My body was braille for the creeping influences.