I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I was lucky to have read a lot of poetry when I was younger; it helped me to remember a way to write.
In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article.
In my life, I've seen enormous increase in the consumption of poetry. When I was young, there were virtually no poetry readings.
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.
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 was completely devoted to reading and books from the age of seven. It took until I was 18 to have the confidence to write poetry.
Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.
Many poets, as you know, are not good readers.
And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.