Poetry is a big space and I love it..

An audience sabotages my freedom, devastates my innocence, corrupts my integrity, inhibits my great joy - and of course gives me further to fall..

There's the space that you soar into, the space that you sometimes break through to, and hang in. A sort of gasp or gap..

I feel much safer faced with a blank sheet of paper than I do with a real person..

I like to think that I'm giving a voice to the silenced..

When I was first published it was like having people rushing in coming to find out where I was hiding. Scary!.

I step naked into the shower of truth - whole-hearted, bloody-minded, utterly selfish, no longer even pretending to enjoy or understand anything..

The very things I used to be told off for - daydreaming, exaggerating, making mistakes, wild guessing, contradicting, spying, being obsessive, being ….

Being a poet is like having an invisible partner. It isn't easy. But you can't live without it either. Talent is only 10 per cent. The rest is obsess….

I'm not so sure that the value of art is all it is cracked up to be..

All I do and say and think 'as a poet' is much truer and more intimate than anything I say face to face..

If I knew how to say it directly, I would not need to write poetry. I would just talk to people and be happy..

What am I writing for anyway? Is it like dreaming? Is it a benevolent process? Something that moves the past forward? And what about those people who….