I'm Ensuring My Place In Heaven.

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.

I Like Eating Out. I Like Buying Beautiful Paintings And Being Surrounded By Beautiful Things. I Have To Finance That Life. I Can Barely Afford A Pension Scheme Because I Don't Make Enough Money.

I Deeply Adored My Mum. She Was An Extraordinary Person, Even For The Prejudice I'm Likely To Have. She Was Beautiful, Amusing, A Tremendous Elaborator Of Things Into Comic Proportions And Extravagant In Her Imagination.

I Read ' Treasure Island' For The First Time At University. And I Started To Notice Then How Unresolved Some Things Were. Later, I Realised That Stevenson Was Interested In Sequels, And I Wondered Whether He Would Have Gone Back To It Had He Lived Longer.

But In A Lot Of Ways My Poems Are Very Conventional, And It's No Big Deal For Me To Write A Poem In Either Free Verse Or Strict Form; Modern Poets Can, And Do, Do Both.