‘A poem that draws on the sciences may sometimes start with a thought or subject far from science—but science then offers the image, metaphor, naming vocabulary that opens a door that poem needed to find.’
‘We say ‘when this is all over’ as a way of fantasising about certain things: touching people, wandering the streets, lying in the sun. But we know that there’s nothing to return to, that is, there is only something different ahead, something yet to be realised, something to hope for and build towards.’
‘It’s true that I find the horizon and the construction of vanishing-point perspective really interesting—almost a language, trying to get at a tension between inwardness and the world as it is.’
‘denuded pastures knocked up with alien seed / forced into furrows with too much water, the thirstiest of crops / invasive, intensive, insistent impositions’
The word ‘lineage’ derives from the Latin linea, meaning a line. It is an account of how things are related in an iterated sequence—describing, for instance, how particular ancestors give rise to descendants in a family tree, or how a species evolves over time from one form to the next, or how ideas have developed over time by being taken up and advanced by one thinker after another.’
‘Borders have very little to do with physical boundaries and far more to do with ideational ones. For me, the practice of political thought is very much about understanding ideological coding, about learning how we are constructed as subjects.’
‘A lot of my poems end up being driven by a feeling, the desire to communicate something abstract in a concrete, resonant way—I look toward how language can do that, rather than structure. And I think that’s because I love the language of lyric poetry.’
‘As I’ve aged, I have developed a fairly relaxed attitude to writing poetry—it’s a form of play involving a mix of words, ideas, images, sounds, textures, shapes and rhythms—a pleasure that nothing else provides. The poem generates from nowhere, everywhere, or anywhere.’
‘In its attention to language, poetry tests the limits of what can be said. In this respect, it seems to approach those emotions or experiences that seem unrepresentable or that would render us inarticulate. In terms of structures of power, poetry is a vehicle of replication but also possible difference in its capacity to ‘tell it slant’, as Emily Dickinson put it. That is, it can enact thinking against foundation.’
