I live in Dairsie, a small village in Fife. It's eight miles away from St Andrew's, where I work as a Professor of English. I don't drive, so I tend to get a lot of ideas while waiting for buses, or on trains. I usually keep a little brown notebook on me. But if someone on a train asked me what I did for a living, I'd say I was a tax-inspector, rather than a poet. I'm shy about it.
At the moment, I'm on a year's sabbatical: this year I'll have two books out, The Donkey's Ears, and one in the autumn, The Year's Afternoon. It's been seven years since I had a book: if you're doing a lot of teaching and hellish administration, you become a pettifrogging bureaucrat rather than a poet. Your interest in poetry becomes secret - although I teach, I mustn't let it contaminate my gift.
This new book, The Donkey's Ears, was written over a period of about 17 years, although most of it at night over the last three. It's a long poem about E. S. Politovsky, the Russian Flag Engineer of the fleet who opened fire on the Hull fishing fleet in 1904. He died in battle in 1905, at Tsushima. A book of his letters to his wife was published afterwards, and I've based the book on that - verse letters to his wife. Writing the book allowed me the excuse to visit all sorts of places in my imagination, such as Indo-China and Africa, where the fleet went. I did a lot of research - but not too much, otherwise it would have become a different book to a book of poems.
I live on my own, so I can write any time. My cottage is really quite small, so my sitting room has to double as a study. At this time of year, I tend to do a lot of my writing in my summerhouse. Well, it's just a shed, really, but it's waterproof and there are a few chairs in it and I sit there with my board and write.
I draft in longhand with a fountain pen or propelling pencil, but I do use the computer for the final version and to print out. I'm terribly nostalgic for typewriters. My electric typewriter went bust about three years ago and no one can fix it.
I usually have several poems on the go at once. But since I finished these two books, I've only written one poem in the last five months, and that one I was asked to write. A colleague asked me to write it. It's about a Scot called Robert Fergusson, who died mad at 23. Poems that you're asked to write don't come easier than ones you write yourself. You have to find a way into them. In the end, I wrote a poem about madness, and it took several months.
You can only write a poem when you have one to write. It's instinct when you know it's finished. I don't do too many readings any more, but I sometimes try out poems on audiences, and if I don't feel embarrassment in my mouth, then I know they're all right.
Lately, I've been rereading Pope and Dryden and Shakespeare. I read Byron, Hardy, and Browning too. I used to read a lot of contemporary and younger poets and now I don't. The older you get, the less you're inclined to want to know what the young are writing - just in case they're better than you, I suppose!
(in conversation with Rosita Boland)
Douglas Dunn's latest book is The Donkey's Ears, published by Faber and Faber at £8.99 in UK