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While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.

Andrew Motion

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Andrew Motion
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: October 26
Biographer
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Sir Andrew Motion
Else
Poetry
Pluralist
Also
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Everything
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Rap
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I am writing more than I have ever done. My life has come back to me in the most extraordinary way.
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Jenni Fagan is the real thing, and The Panopticon is a real treat: maturely alive to the pains of maturing, and cleverly amused as well as appalled by what it finds in the world.
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I read ' Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.
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I am a vigilant monarchist. I want to see things evolve. The direction the monarchy seems to be moving in - towards a more mainland-European model - is one I would feel sympathetic about.
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Each sudden gust of light explains itself as flames, but neither they, nor even bombs redoubled on the hills tonight can quite include me in their fear.
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I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.
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I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.
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I write between 5.30am and 9.00. That way, I hope I carry over something from my dream time.
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But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
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I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.
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But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form modern poets can, and do, do both.
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Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.
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I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.
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Like a lot of people, for a long time I thought that the road to hell is paved with bad sequels.
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I deeply adored my mum. She was an extraordinary person, even for the prejudice I'm likely to have. She was beautiful, amusing, a tremendous elaborator of things into comic proportions and extravagant in her imagination.
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In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.
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Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril
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But I can't and don't ever want to write bell-yanking confetti-tossing hat-throwing poems.
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I'm ensuring my place in heaven.
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