I became quite obsessed. There was a period of two years when I read nothing but gardening catalogues. I really thought my life as a poet was over. Then I wrote The Wild Iris (1992), a book in which flowers speak. I could see that a lot of the prose from the catalogues came into the poems. One of the things I feel most strongly—and that book taught it to me—is that you have to allow yourself your obsessions. You can’t decide they’re not literary enough, or not elevated enough. I mean, it’s not that I had given myself permission to read the catalogues, but it was all I could put my mind to. I realized subsequently that this was the catalyst for a book that seemed to me at the time the best thing I’d written—it doesn’t now, but it did then.

Lately, I’ve been watching a whole lot of television, and I’m sure it will get into my work—maybe not the fact of its being television, or maybe that too, I don’t know, but the point is that I don’t feel I have a choice. You must trust that impulse in yourself, because your work is going to come out of what absorbs you. Your work is not going to come out of things you decide should absorb you.