Two blokes who would like fewer, better poems

Don't worry that the process of revision seems slow. The writer's tools were developed early - paper, pen, and ink; a watchful eye; an open heart - and good writing is still the patient handiwork of those simple tools. A poet who makes only one really fine poem during his life gives far more to the world than the poet who publishes twenty books of mediocre verse. The Industrial Revolution did not reach imaginative writing until recently, and today black clouds of soot belch from the smokestacks over the creative writing schools. Poems get manufactured and piled on the loading docks where many of them rot for lack of transport. Wouldn't we all be better off if there wasn't such an emphasis on productivity?

At a party, I once heard a woman say that it was "criminal" that Harper Lee had written only the one novel, To Kill A Mockingbird. What peculiar expectations we've developed for our writers! "Criminal?" We ought to be thankful Lee used her time to write her book as perfectly as she could, that she didn't rush a lot of half-finished books into print.

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You cannot work too hard at poetry. People are bad at it not because they have tin ears, but because they simply don't have the faintest idea how much work goes into it. It's not as if you're ordering a pizza or doing something that requires direct communication in a very banal way. But it seems these days the only people who spend time over things are retired people and prisoners. We bolt things, untasted.

It's so easy to say, 'That'll do.' Everyone's in a hurry. People are intellectually lazy, morally lazy, ethically lazy...

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