I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.
Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.
I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.
I've been trekking the hills and lanes of the British countryside for nearly four decades now and I've come to associate my passion with overexcited poets rather than pampered painters.
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.
I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it.
Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before.
Some people ask, 'How do you attract the young and so many different people when your poetry is complicated and different?' I say, 'My accomplishment is that my readers trust me and accept my suggestions for change.'
I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.