The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The experiment of poetry, as far as I am concerned, happens when the poem carries you beyond where you could have reasonably expected to go.
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.
I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'
I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.
I have to admit that I had a lot of problems with poetry.
I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Strictly speaking, the idea of a scientific poem is probably as nonsensical as that of a poetic science.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.