Which poets have most influenced you?

I first fell for the British Romantics: Keats for his sensitivity, and Byron for his humour, both qualities I try to exercise in my own work. Otherwise it’s the Americans of last century: the Moderns, Stevens in particular, and later the West Coast poets. I like to find these poets thinking (and sometimes running) in my poems.

Are poems chiefly ‘inspired’ or crafted?

The grit for a poem is found inside the poetic experience – a state of mind marked by sustained focus and deep immersion in a subject – and later crafted into an object of art. Paradoxically, a poem is nothing without craft, yet its craft must be made to look like nothing.