Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions..

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson..

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me..

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry..

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five..

Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms..

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties..

You sleep with a dream of summer weather, wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain. Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass and rainy….

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the Americ….

You've got criminal courts and child welfare officials refusing to do their jobs and protect children so they can shift the cases over to family cour….

Mind led body to the edge of the precipice. They stared in desire at the naked abyss. If you love me, said mind, take that step into silence. If you ….

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century..

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were..

A hobbyhorse can be a tiring ride for nonenthusiasts..

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as pos….

democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their ….

I married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since..

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy pers….

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sis….

I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real em….

The sea is as near as we come to another world..