Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there, you were made to feel that, if a poet and female, you could not really be serious about it unless you'd made a least one suicide attempt. So I felt I was running out of time.

After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at my university who we…

A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disass…

I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties - unlike now - female journ…

O, she walked unaware of her own increasing beauty That was holding men's thoughts from market or plough,

'Dream tonight of peacock tails, / Diamond fields and spouter whales. / Ills are many, blessings few, / But dreams tonight will shelter you.'

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.