Like so many poets, you’re a champion of the Staying Alive anthology. What is its appeal, do you think?

Staying Alive, a prequel to Being Alive, is published by Bloodaxe, a powerhouse in the poetry world. What’s really fantastic about this anthology is the range of poets from all over the world and the way it’s organised thematically. You can have a theme of personal journeys and you’ll find all these different poems on that theme. The other great thing about it is that different poems have a conversation with each other, just because of the way the book has been ordered. For some reason it really captures people’s imaginations and it was one of these poetry anthologies that really took off. All sorts of people backed it and it was exciting and groundbreaking.

Is there any section or poem that particularly appeals to you?

Yes. The roads and journeys section. There’s a poem by Mary Oliver, ‘The Journey’, which I love. It works on so many different levels and I think people identify with it. There are lots of poems from this book which I really like: the poems about wasps and bees and the body and soul section. It’s an anthology that I often use in workshops. I did one in Ilkley the other day on the theme of doppelgangers, and there were a couple of poems that I thought were perfect for that theme. Then there are poems like Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, so the classic poems exist alongside poets people wouldn’t have heard of.

I was interested in your choice Making For Planet Alice: New Women Poets.

This is edited by Maura Dooley, who’s a wonderful poet and also a good friend. I like this book because it introduced me to lots of poets I hadn’t heard of, so that was exciting. I first came across Alice Oswald in this book.

Do you think poets like these don’t get enough attention in the mainstream media?

Yes, definitely. There are certain poets that get a lot of attention all the time. People will know Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy or Simon Armitage but there are a lot of poets that seem to exist just outside people’s radar, yet they’ve been doing good work for a number of years.

Why do you think that is?

I think it’s just because of our slightly obsessed media culture. We tend to point single lights at people rather than at groups. I think that within the poetry world, everybody has heard of everybody else. But that world is quite specific and it takes quite a lot to break out of that. Most of the people reading poems are other poets (of the kind of poets that I’m talking about). It would just be nice to see those poets break out into a more general readership.

How can we encourage a wider audience to read poetry like this?

Well, I think some things have been happening. There are lots of poetry readings and literature festivals all over the place. There are poems on the underground and poems on the radio, and all these things make poetry more accessible to a wider audience. But our problem is still in whose poetry becomes accessible, so that’s what needs to be changed. Another book I’m going to talk about is Red: Contemporary Black British Poets, which has 80 black British poets in the anthology. If you ask the average person in the street how many black British poets they know, they might say four or five, but they wouldn’t necessarily come up with 80.

Is the poetry world a bit sexist? Is there any reason that new women poets are promoted in Making For Planet Alice?

Yes, I think there is sexism in the poetry world. There’s this idea that men write better poems than women and I think that still definitely exists. There are a few women poets that they make exceptions, that they change into one of the boys, as it were.

Is there any poet you want to pick from Planet Alice?

It’s a strong collection of very different voices. I think Lavinia Greenlaw is great, particularly ‘The Shape of Things’ and ‘Iron Lung’, and Sinéad Morrissey is fantastic. It was published in 1997 and it’s still exciting. The selection of the poems is pretty strong. Alice Oswald is unique and has a very natural and different voice. She’s wonderful at writing about nature and she takes huge risks. Her mountains poem is very good.  Sarah Maguire is a poet that’s amazing and doesn’t get enough attention. She wrote ‘Spilt Milk’.

Moving on to a single collection: The Black Unicorn by Audre Lorde.

I first came across The Black Unicorn in the 1980s. The poems are unified and I really like single collections where there’s some sort of connection rather than 40 disparate poems. This book has an incredible unity. I think it’s the most achieved of all of her poetry collections, and it’s a book I’ve had throughout my life.

Was she a mentor?

Yes, I met her. I worked for the publishers who published her and she stayed with me for a week when she came over for a feminist book fair in 1983. She was really lovely, really warm. A lot of people were scared of her, but I wasn’t, even though she was very outspoken. I loved the way she wrote and talked about silence and the way she used the Dahomey woman and African mythology in her poetry.