Why I Write

My primary impulse is a private, individual one- a powerful urge to say the unsayable; this is one of the ways in which I think of poetry, its purpose and function. The desire to make sense of the amorphous and chaotic experience of living is part of this; I can't do better than quote Picasso: 'Art stabilises us on the edge of chaos'. From as far back as I can remember in my growing up, the way to 'make sense' was through words, so I have a lifelong passion for the power and intricacies of language. I write to discover, not to tell what I know. The flash of something new (even if in one sense familiar) is where a poem begins; the writing of the poem elucidates for me what that first glimpse meant.