“I LOVE WHAT CECIL DAY LEWIS SAID ABOUT POETRY: THAT HE DOES NOT WRITE POEMS TO BE UNDERSTOOD, BUT TO UNDERSTAND.

“I never chose to be a poet, and I certainly don’t sit down to tell the world something I know about. Usually, all I am aware of is a kind of wind-still, then a welling up in my chest. When I go for a run, strange bits of syntax, descriptions, lines might rise up from somewhere. Then, if I am lucky, these fragments will collapse into a poem. To me, reading and writing poems is like a opening a window out into an unseen world behind the ordinary one, perhaps the same world our dreams are filmed in. When I open that window, I am searching for something; sometimes I am fed, I rest, or am exquisitely disturbed. I am always left wanting more.”