‘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.’
‘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.’
