Last year I was a judge for a prize in England, the T.S. Eliot Prize, so I read everything that was published in England last year.

Words want to find chimes with each other, things want to connect.

I certainly am interested in accessibility, clarity, and immediacy.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are clichés also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

One will never again look at a birch tree, after the Robert Frost poem, in exactly the same way.

Form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

Confusion is what we're living with - not being able to make sense of what's happening to us from day to day. Whereas making sense is what we're aiming for - making sense.

That's one of the great things about poetry; one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop, as it were.

I believe that these devices like repetition and rhyme are not artificial, that they're not imposed, somehow, on the language.

I suppose for whatever reason I actively welcome being put down, something which perhaps goes back to my upbringing - that accusation of not being worthy which could be laid at one's door.

The governments and their policies have failed, the church is the last hope of the common man, I value a church that is a home for all.

There shall come a day when Birds shall be free... :) and humans will see...

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

Willingly no one chooses the yoke of slavery.

I had bags of energy as a kid.

Let things alone; let them weigh what they will; let them soar or fall.

Like most people in Academia, my vision of the future is the same as the average industry person's vision of five years ago.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

O the joy of my spirit - it is uncaged - it darts like lightning!