Read the interview with Andrew Duncan originally published in 'Don't Start Me Talking: Interviews with Contemporary Poets' (Salt Publishing, 2007).

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Extracts:

"It was a long time before I encountered Spender in person — round about the time of the Watergate trials in America. I was finishing up graduate work, and he was a writer-in residence at Northwestern. By chance I glanced in one morning to the huge TV viewing room at one of the student residences and saw Spender's snowy head of hair and his lanky frame right in the middle of rows of empty seats — he was the only one there — watching the live telecast of Nixon's downfall."

"Rigour and dexterity, elegance of expression and neatly turned syntax — a combination of these things has always been attractive. For me, 'compression is the first grace of style'. I liked Violette Leduc’s line about wanting 'to achieve the brevity of a fowl pecking at a single grain of corn'."