History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks.

I do insist on making what I hope is sense so there's always a coherent narrative or argument that the reader can follow.

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

A lot happens by accident in poetry.