I’ve never heard of Ken Smith, so please tell me about him.

I always like selected poems from a poet because it gives a good cross section of their psyche. I also like somebody in a nice shiny Bloodaxe book. When I was writing the poetry column for The Times for a couple of years, and I had to plough through reams and reams of books, I had to find two things: first, a poet I liked, and second, a poem I could actually write a little story about. One of the things I like about Ken Smith is that he tackles quite difficult subjects: people’s moods and people changing. There’s one I used for The Times called ‘The Son’, which describes how the presence of a boy has permeated every part of his parent’s lives: their home, their utensils, their memories, even as he has grown up and left home. Of course he comes back and he doesn’t recognise the person that they think he is. He is alien now and no longer belongs. Yet the essence of the child that he once was still lives on in the people who reared him. It’s quite specific and almost brutal. One of the things I like about certain poets is lack of fluff. I don’t like fluff – if you can use three words where ten will do, then why not use three words and avoid diluting the point of the piece? If you want fluff, buy a pillow.

Do you think it’s incredibly hard to pare down poetry?

It depends on the poem and the poet. Some people are more verbally economical by nature than others. Also everybody has a different voice and a different way of writing. But there are poets I’ve read who appear to have started a sentence and then become bogged down by adding several extraneous and unnecessary elements. And I think well, actually, that unadulterated sentence would have been quite sufficient and rather good. So the poets I have chosen are quite sparse in general terms, but not without humour – although Ken Smith’s poetry has a certain wistfulness about it, yet it’s very very strong. You could argue that it’s very masculine. His observations are specific and to the point; he doesn’t impose emotion on them. Some poets want you to use their own emotions and describe how sad or tragic or happy something is, as if to say, ‘I want you to feel this’. But I think it’s a much better idea to produce the evidence and have the reader find their own emotions for themselves. I would say Ken Smith is a very good poet to do that with. The selection covers 18 years and is hugely varied; I believe there is something in there for everyone.

Let’s look at the heavyweight Dylan Thomas.

Yes, let’s. I love a ‘collected poems’ because it gives you everything, so it’s very good value for money!

When you were a teenager, was he one of the poets you turned to first?

No, not particularly. I came to him quite late, actually. Again, one of the things I liked about him is I had been subjected, for various reasons, to a lot of lightweight namby-pamby poetry and it was just a joy to pick up a book where a poet was quite brutal and honed and expert. But also he’s lyrical; each poem lassos the reader and draws you in – no matter how long the poem, you want to read it to the end. He’s a musical joy and in comparison to the more modern poets I was reading at the time, he was a relief. He’s eloquent and a gentleman and each phrase is weighed for its purpose. He’s more verbally decorative than some of the other poets I have chosen; his poems are rich in thought and substance without diluting their purpose, whereas a lot of stuff that I come across is empty. ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’ has to be one of my favourite poems. He also wrote a poem ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’, a very short poem, which is deliciously sharp and brutal and makes the reader sit up and take notice.

Let’s move on to Simon Armitage’s CloudCuckooLand.

Armitage has an idiosyncratic view of the world and an extremely interesting way of delivering that view. He makes me think twice about almost everything he writes, and quite often there’s such a twist in his sense of humour, I find it irresistible. I love this: ‘Staring into a specimen cell of my own blood, I saw a microdot of my own face looking back up, I jumped away from the lens alarmed like a man who invented the telephone and suddenly it rang.’

It’s so fantastically random.

Yes, it is – and his imagery is unexpected, often in the extreme, and that makes you think, and that makes you look at things in a different way. One of the purposes of a poem is to take something mundane and look at it in another way so that it becomes interesting and the person reading the poem gets a different view of it, whereas before they might have passed it by.

Do you think you achieve that with your poetry?

I’d like to think so, because that’s why I write the poem. When I first write something, because a thought, or an idea, or a peculiar view pops into my head and I want to get it down, it becomes an irresistible itch that I have to scratch.