The poet on her early obsession with poetry, inventing her own struggling male poet and only realising the core theme behind her collection after it was published
Kingsley Amis described writing poems as “a limited risk enterprise”. He thought, perhaps unfairly, that this was why Philip Larkin, after producing a couple of novels early in his career, stuck to poetry thereafter. You can waste a day or two producing a hopeless poem. A hopeless novel takes months or years of your life.
The Amis quotation has stayed with me because I only write short things: bits of journalism and poems. My books are accumulations.
The title poem is the result of seeing Amis at a reception and wishing that someone would introduce us
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