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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.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

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

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

I've been surprised to learn how many people love poetry. It's beautiful to see that people want poetry in their lives.

I just discovered when I was, oh, 12 or 13, that I was very interested in language - and this showed itself as poetry. There was no looking back.

I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.

I never thought I'd be doing poetry books. I never really studied poetry. But the first one I did was after my mother died, and I realized that people sort of think and talk about her style and fashion, but in fact, what made her the person she was was really her love of reading and ideas.

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

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.