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

I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

I find great consolation in having a lot of poetry books around. I believe that writing poetry and reading it are deeply intertwined. I've always delighted in the company of the poets I've read.

I wrote a lot of poetry when I was a teenager - mostly desperate love poetry!

When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.