You can find poetry in your everyday life, your memory, in what people say on the bus, in the news, or just what's in your heart.
Carol Ann Duffy
Christmas is taken very seriously in this household. I believe in Father Christmas, and there's no way I'd do anything to undermine that belief.
Poetry and prayer are very similar.
It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal.
Like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant. In each poem, I'm trying to reveal a truth, so it can't have a fictional beginning.
I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety.
I always say that I'll have a go and see whether the poem works and if it does, then fine.
Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.
If I felt, in the event of a royal wedding, inspired to write about people coming together in marriage or civil partnership, I would just be grateful to have an idea for the poem. And if I didn't, I'd ignore it.
The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.
I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.
I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.
Auden said poetry makes nothing happen. But I wonder if the opposite could be true. It could make something happen.
I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr. Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing.
The moment of inspiration can come from memory, or language, or the imagination, or experience - anything that makes an impression forcibly enough for language to form.
When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light.
The poem is a form of texting... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is.
I like to think that I'm a sort of poet for our times.
I still read Donne, particularly his love poems.
Every day is a gift with a child, no matter what problems you have.
Edinburgh is my favourite city. We'll be doing a lot of children's theatre and galleries.
Between 9am and 3pm is when I work most intensely.
I write in that space between Ella's childhood and mine. I know it all sounds a bit sinister.
My prose is turgid, it just hasn't got any energy.
I'll be left writing picture books and fairy tales.
I am always pleased to be asked to write a poem.
If we think of what's up ahead, with climate change and wars over water, it's very frightening.
I still have a feeling that I haven't written the best that I can write. I think all poets must feel this: that there is constantly something new to be discovered in the language. It's like a thrilling encounter, and you can find things.
I see the shape of the poem before I start writing, and the writing is just the process of arriving at the shape.
I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way.
I always wanted a child. Being a mother is the central thing in my life.
Having a child takes you back to all those parts of your own childhood that you had hidden away.
