Well, they can often be lost in contemporary poetry, I suppose, but the best of contemporary poetry has all of those things as much as poetry from any period in our past.

The constraints? I’m not sure quite how to answer that. In my own writing, I tend to inflict technical constraints on myself and my poems – line-length, stanza-length, syllable-counts, rhyme schemes and so on – partly as a way to make myself consider every word’s weight ruthlessly. I find that helps, some people don’t. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that poetry has any constraints, inherently. The possibilities are infinite.

As different as different can be. Though the Arvon experience is an interesting one. They’re week-long residential courses in beautiful country houses, with no access to television, radio or the internet. I’m not the most prolific of writers, but when I’m away at an Arvon course, I tend to write a burst of three or four poems in that week. And that’s partly because I find the teaching aspect of it so stimulating. It’s inspiration in every way to be among a group of 15 students who are discovering, exploring and stretching their creativity. That rubs off.

I was very lucky as a teenager that I met David Hughes, a teacher at my school – not that he taught me, formally, ever – who recognised my potential. I was in a pop group, and wrote hundreds of lyrics which somehow fell into his hands. He took the trouble to write some helpful notes about them, suggesting that I might like to think about formalising their structures a bit, and taking out the bits that went, “Oooh, baby” and so forth, and thinking about them more as poems. And I did. And it was more exciting than writing pop lyrics had ever been.

I was also inspired by a poet called Nigel Forde, who was the father of a girl from our rival school next door who I went out with for several years. He had an amazing library of poetry books which I plundered throughout those years. He also lives in a beautiful house in the middle of nowhere a few miles outside York, which is the perfect environment for writing. And he was very happy to sit up very late into the night reading my poems and giving me good advice about where I was going wrong.

Then, at university, I was taught Middle English by Bernard O’Donoghue, who was at that stage publishing his first or second full-length book of poems. He was very, very generous with his time, reading my poems and making suggestions. And generally being a great influence in all sorts of ways – his modesty about his work, his knowledge and his quiet, intensely moving poems seemed to add up to a model of the kind of poet I wanted to be.

So they were all informal ‘tutors’ of poetry. I’ve not had any formal tutoring in writing at all. But the most important thing that they taught me, all of them, was to read. Read everything. Go back to Anglo-Saxon verse and read everything up to today. Read from around the world. You can’t contribute much new to an art-form if you don’t know all there is to know about it.

Ilkley’s got a very special place in my heart, actually. It, and all the festivals like it, are crucial, not only because they being big names to a particular place for an identifiable stretch of time, but because they put so much effort into engaging young people, and people whose normal engagement with literature may not be that great.

There may have been events like that around when I was starting out, but I don’t remember them. Maybe that’s just a feature of where I lived, though. I do remember being very excited to be asked to read at the first York Literature Festival with Ian Duhig, back in 1998 or 1999.

Since then, I’ve really come to love festivals and readings. The writing is the main thing, but I do love standing in front of real people and reading to them.

Yes – an amazing boost. I’d had my first book published by that stage, and been dropped by my publisher, Oxford University Press, along with the whole of their contemporary poets list. So it felt like a vulnerable time. It didn’t so much re-affirm the importance of writing for me as reassure me that there were people who believed my writing was worth reading. And that’s a useful spur to keep your writing going.

One of the great things about it was the prize ceremony in a very flash roof-top bar in London. Living in York, as I did then, I felt a very long way from the poetry community, so spending an evening in the company of my heroes like Dannie Abse and Hugo Williams made me feel a little more linked-in – a little more as if I belonged.

For what it’s worth, I don’t like thinking of poetry as a ‘career’. I have a career, in arts marketing. Poetry’s much more important to me than a career.

Yes, Bugs. I gave myself a real headache with that. When I’d published Flying Fish in 2002, I didn’t write anything for a long time, then the first four or five poems I wrote, by sheer coincidence, happened to have insects in them. So I decided, with only four or five poems written, that the new book was to be called ‘Bugs’. And then everything I wrote had, somehow, to fit the title. I think that meant I abandoned lots of poems which I might otherwise have finished, and the book took forever to write. And I was thinking of it, throughout, as a Book with a capital ‘B’, rather than as one poem, then another poem, then another poem.

I’ve mixed feelings about it now – I’m very proud of the book, and of the way it all feels as if it belongs together, but it was torture at times. At the moment, I’m just writing poems. No plan, no title, no deadline – just poems. And I’m writing rather more quickly, and rather more happily, now than I did in the process towards Bugs.

Thanks. It’s been fascinating to work with poets from Holland (including Marieke Barnas, who wrote ‘The Scythe’), China, Hungary and Israel on my translation projects. It started with a trip to Budapest to read for a poetry society there. I hatched a plan with that society to bring a group of five young British poets out the following year, and we received amazing financial and practical support from the British Council. We travelled with six Hungarian poets to a beautiful place called The Translators’ House on the shore of Lake Balaton and spent several days swapping poems with them, talking about them in minute details, translating them (or making ‘versions’, perhaps) and discussing the results.

The different projects have all worked in different ways, but at the heart of them all has been spending time in a quiet place with a poet from a different country and culture, talking a lot. I didn’t realise I would be so interested in it, but the trips to Israel and China in particular have been among the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve done in my life. Russia next, please, if anyone out there can pull any strings...

Read a lot, write a lot and grow a thick skin to deal with the inevitable rejections (which don’t stop, just because you’ve been published). And remember that editors are people, too.