There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

What you remember saves you.

I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write