It’s a well known thing that ordinary perceptions can have a strange aspect when one is travelling.

Politics is there the way men and women are there, the way the Atlantic Ocean is there. Sometimes I’ve written about politics specifically, I mean about politics as it’s understood on television and in newspapers.

I probably misunderstand misunderstanding itself.

I’ve had trouble with criticism, I guess. It’s hard to know what role criticism plays in either encouraging poets or in getting other people to read them.

I don’t think the nature of my poetry is satirical or even ironic, I think it’s essentially lyrical but again I don’t know if it’s my position to say what my poetry is like.

I’m a writer who likes to be influenced.

I love painting and music, of course. I don’t know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I’ve certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn’t read it until I was in my late 20s.

I thought, ‘There are a lot of poets who have the courage to look into the abyss, but there are very few who have the courage to look happiness in the face and write about it,’ which is what I wanted to be able to do.

You can’t be too influenced by a great poet. You simply have to live through it.

Picasso said once when being interviewed that one should not be one’s own connoisseur.