It is always better to write for the whole of society than for the poetry-reading public.
I hate the anglicanisation of culture, the idea that culture is genteel. It's not genteel.
A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.
I spent a lot of time on recce. It is a kind of creative chaos, but I like the sense of creative serendipity.
I was well read and knew languages, but I didn't want to become Ezra Pound. I wanted to write poetry that people like my parents might respond to.
The Greek tragic mask is one of my main metaphors for the role of the poet. The eyes of the tragic mask are always open to witness even the worst, and the mouth is always open to make poetry from it. Neither ever close.
I've realised darkness and light are inter-dependent, just as death is an enhancer of life.
I hate everything about writing except doing it.
I love being on the road with others, with a camera, but also being alone writing poetry.
I think that, as you get older, you want to be freer rather than more bound.
Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. I often make a point of seeking them out and have used them as mouthpieces in my film poetry, as with Heinrich Heine in 'The Gaze of the Gorgon.'
'Night Mail' belongs quintessentially to the age of steam. It is impossible to simply go with the idea of remaking it.
I'm not the sort of person who reads much about himself.
I think poems belong as much in the news pages as the literary pages. A lot of people throw aside the literary pages! Whereas everybody looks at the news section.
I really admire the great Japanese artists who could change their name three times in a lifetime. You could get rid of one and renew yourself.
I wanted to learn Latin and Greek and become a poet and acquire power over language. I only understand this clearly in retrospect, that my ability to study came from a hunger to learn all the resources of articulation.
There's a kind of despair about whether art can really do anything, but you have to incorporate that despair into the way you work. I try to soak my work in my sense of futility and fury.
For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.
I think it's the tendency to want to create gods and monotheistic absolutes and absolute certainties that is the continual temptation in human thought - that's the great danger. Every time we create a god, we diminish humanity.
I am capable of bad taste - deliberately.
