Because a poem is not written while running or while answering the phone. It's written in whatever minutes one has. Sometimes you have half an hour.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

The decision for me was whether to have 'The Father' be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else.

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.

Maybe we can use a metaphor for it, out of dance. I think for many years I was aware of the need, in dance and in life, to breathe deeply and to take in more air than we usually take in.

Poets are like steam valves, where the ordinary feelings of ordinary people can escape and be shown.

I'm probably so out of it at my age that I don't know what people think.