I usually write with fair facility, that is to say, it goes straight down, but I do a considerable amount of revision afterwards. However, the thing which is most interesting to me about the process of writing is what particularly moves you to write on a, say, a theme or a particular purpose. Well, with me it’s rather like something sticking into me, something will get into my mind, and since I observe this much of a method that I have a set of notebooks which I work in, I’m usually working in, say, four notebooks at once and approaching from one end and from the other end, moving towards the middle, so that I have sort of places where I am working, like a workshop, like a sculptor might have his workshop where he has still got a piece, say, unfinished which he is working on. I have poems which are in unfinished states, which I keep going back to, and every time I get an idea for a poem I just put it in a margin and return to it. The one thing I do believe in is often choosing deliberately a particular external form before you actually choose your poem, though over the years I’ve tended to write more free verse poems, but I still like returning to poems in set forms and recently I’ve been writing a whole batch of sonnets.
I also try to use different forms and to attempt things which I haven’t done before, but mostly it’s ideas, I suppose. I’m probably an impure poet, I believe in impure poetry, I’m not interested in lyrical qualities for themselves. What interests me in poetry is the confrontation of certain sorts of language, and therefore I like to be able to use many different styles, many different ways of doing things. I neither like to be particularly modern nor particularly traditional. In my view, the best poets are those who, starting from a traditional basis, widen the language by their own imagination.
