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.
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.
And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.
I was very interested in American poetry for many years. Much less now.
I used to have a great love for Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, the big boys of the last century.
I said I have no powers of invention. Well, I also have no powers of mimicry.
In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry.
I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.
I just didn't want to shoot other people.
I used to fish the Border rivers, but nowadays you have to queue up for a shot and I can't stand that.
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