Great Regulars: I wish I'd been better able to

resist the sense of obligation to write some of the poems I did. It's in the nature of commissioned work to be written too much from the side of your mind that knows what it's doing, which dries up the poetry. Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: 'The day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been very few and far between came back to me'

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