I've always associated the moment of writing with a moment of lift, of joy, of unexpected reward.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.

I've said it before about the Nobel Prize: it's like being struck by a more or less benign avalanche. It was unexpected, unlooked for, and extraordinary.