I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own.
It's like breathing in and out to me. It's like having a conversation with someone who isn't there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody - not a particular person, or very rarely.
I don't think of myself all the time.
If I wrote a play with four characters every single one of them would talk like me regardless of age or sex.
When I go fishing I like to know that there's nobody within five miles of me.
When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man.
And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.
When I was a teacher, teachers would come into my classroom and admire my desk on which lay nothing whatever, whereas theirs were heaped with papers and books.
And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it.
And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.
But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!
But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.
And some poets are far better read off the page because they're very bad speakers. I'm thinking of one in particular whom I won't name, a good poet, and he reads in such a dry, boring way, your eyes start drooping.
Anybody who writes doesn't like to be misunderstood.
All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.
A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.
I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.
All those authors there, most of whom of course I've never met. That's the poetry side, that's the prose side, that's the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you've enjoyed.
And in a way, that's been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet - sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.
However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird.
