Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion
Sir Andrew Motion, FRSLis an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 October 1952
writing two tea
I get up at 5.30am, sluice myself and have two Weetabix and some mint tea, before starting to write by 6am.
beautiful buying painting
I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.
islands gone treasure
I read ' Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.
powerful interesting way
In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.
pain real alive
Jenni Fagan is the real thing, and The Panopticon is a real treat: maturely alive to the pains of maturing, and cleverly amused as well as appalled by what it finds in the world.
honor ordinary
Honor the miraculousness of the ordinary.
writing trying moments
I shall try to write a poem that is about the moment but doesn't betray things that are true to me as a poet.
long people hell
Like a lot of people, for a long time I thought that the road to hell is paved with bad sequels.
rap should-have choices
While also, importantly, not wanting to dumb it down or pretend the days of 'difficult' poetry are over, because we live in a pluralist culture and there's room for 'difficult' poetry alongside rap and everything else. And poetry won't be for everyone, but everyone should have the choice.
dream writing way
I write between 5.30am and 9.00. That way, I hope I carry over something from my dream time.
people feelings want
I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time.
heart emotional forget
Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril
wordsworth poet admire
But Wordsworth is the poet I admire above all others.
allowed attention hard looked paying stop
When you're being looked at very hard, it's very hard to look back. And that made me stop paying attention to the world in a way that allowed me then to write about it.