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I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.

Most victims of my autobiographical verse are either far too polite, remarkably understanding unaware that I have written poems about them.

I feel very connected to poets across the country.

If I'm the people's poet, then I ought to be in people's hands - and, I hope, in their heart.

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

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

Most of my life I have played a lot of famous people but most of them were dead so you have a poetic license.

If I were to die thinking that I'd written three poems that people might read after me, I would feel that I hadn't lived in vain. Great poets might expect the whole body of their work, but most of us - well, I would settle for a handful.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.