The middle class is doing fine in fiction. But it's not what gets me going. I love the working class and everyone from it I've met and think they're incredibly witty inventive - there's a lot of poetry there.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom on the stairs everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

In the language of poetry where every word is weighed nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all not a single existence not anyone's existence in this world.

Everyone needs solitude especially a person who is used to thinking about what she experiences. Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

While also importantly not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone but everyone should have the choice.

Everything is complicated if that were not so life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

I've written for every medium except poetry at which I suck.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.