My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people so there's no virtue in that it's the way one is raised.

I came to poetry through the urgent need to denounce injustice exploitation humiliation. I know that's not enough to change the world. But to remain silent would have been a kind of intolerable complicity.