What are the seeds of your work? Do your poems grow from a feeling you want to convey, or a question you want to ask?

No. I never have the slightest thing in mind. In fact, I am suspicious of my existing ideas, my conscious thoughts and convictions. They are what I need to get beyond, into ignorance and after that, with luck, discovery. I begin to write when a phrase appears in my head—a word cluster, sometimes a single word. The task is to discover the world or voice from which this fragment can speak or elaborate itself into a story or a personality or a mood. This is rather crudely said.

A poem, to my mind, creates visible or auditory forms for something that is invisible, which is the feeling, or the emotion, or the metaphysical content of a moment. Now it may also include action, but its attack is what I call the ‘vertical’ attack, and this may be a little bit clearer if you will contrast it to what I would call the ‘horizontal’ attack of a drama, which is concerned with the development from situation to situation, whereas a poem is concerned with the development, let’s say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling.