Christopher Reid interview: can poets be funny? Throughout our conversation, he looks wryly at the Dictaphone and cautions me against spoilers. It's when we talk about the structure, and the ending (which I won't reveal) that more serious considerations emerge. The form of Six Bad Poets is so tight the denouement has to come on cue. I absolutely knew that once I'd done six sections in six chapters, it had to come to an end. It was a matter of applying the brakes in a particular kind of way. But when he reflects on the way A Scattering came together, it's a different matter. When I wrote the first section, which I wrote when Lucinda was still alive, I had no idea of what was going to follow. I just wrote that to tell her what I felt about her predicament. And then she died, and then it became obvious I had to write more... I'd seen a remarkable thing - her bravery in the face of death, and that was something that needed celebrating. The harmony of the collection's close came as if by chance: the last word is "blessing" and the first is "Blessed." In fact, Six Bad Poets is an exception in Reid's work, and he has no plans to make a habit of tying up loose ends. "Since A Scattering, in everything I've written - and it'll happen again - the subject of when you get close to it, a loved one's death is bound to be endless, because it's never resolved," he says. But the matter still isn't as simple as saying, there's a funny Christopher Reid who satirises literati and another one who is unlikely to crack a smile. I ask him about a remarkable narrative poem that came between A Scattering and Six Bad Poets. It's called "Professor Winterthorn's Journey," in which a scholar crashes a conference convened to discuss Nonsense, and recalls his late wife with a mixture of mourning and remorse. At first he answers with a joshing, "poor old Professor Winterthorn," and I feel lame for having taken the character too seriously, or autobiographically. But Reid is clear about how unclear this is: "What I wanted to do was to allow that kind of pathos or even tragic depth to an essentially comic character. I don't see why clowns shouldn't be allowed their grief as well. Reid is a funny poet. He makes fun of his characters; he gives them good jokes, too. And he has a keen sense of when to take himself seriously, and when not. He is really funny about his adventures as a creative writing professor, although I'm left thinking that it was probably not such fun at the time. He looks back on his time as Faber's poetry editor with a feeling of satisfaction, but is as sure that his decision to leave while he was still doing good work was wise: "I've never regretted it. It seemed like the right thing to do just then. I never wanted to be the grumpy old fart shuffling about the office with people saying, 'What does he do exactly?"" It was a move prompted by a fax from Ted Hughes (whose letters Reid edited) 10 days before he died. It quoted Goethe: "Unless you give yourself wholeheartedly to a project, nothing will come of it. The moment you do give yourself wholeheartedly to a project, Providence will step in and help you. So it's reassuring to know that when he gave himself to Six Bad Poets, it was with "maximum intensity," and that such a serious effort was in the name of great fun. Six Bad Poets is published by Faber and available from Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514) for £12.99 + £1.35 p&p