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Poets can't resist the dramatic pull of their lives and so inevitably write autobiographical verse.

I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have.

I'm very conscious that people dear to me are alive in my imagination - poets in particular.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

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.

Don't call my lyrics poetry. It's an insult to real poets.

For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader.

Poetry at its best can do you a lot of harm.

I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.