More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

I wanted to reimagine the role in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents events preoccupations and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

Thanks partly to the kind of poets that we now have and partly to funding there's been a gigantic shift in the way poetry is perceived... Poems on the Underground poets in schools football clubs zoos.

In a general way I want to be a kind of flag-waver bunting hanger-up drum-beater you name it for poetry.

I'm not precisely saying that a really good board meeting at the MLA (Museums Libraries and Archives Coucil) makes me want to go and write poetry but there is a pleasure in doing that sort of thing well.

Poetry is at the centre of my life too emotionally speaking and intellectually speaking - it's just that I'm one of those people who enjoy doing other stuff as well.

Those who say we should dismantle the role of Poet Laureate altogether the trick they miss is that being called this thing with the weight of tradition behind it and with the association of the Royal family does allow you to have conversations and to open doors and wallets for the good of poetry in a way that nothing else would allow.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom on the stairs everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

Poetry is a mere drug Sir.

It's like I understand images and some people understand poetry.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry but film writing brilliant film writing is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

I write all the time - I write poetry I love to write.

Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes.

Science is for those who learn poetry is for those who know.

I learned to impersonate the kind of person that talks about poetry. It comes from teaching I think.

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form and that it's timeless that it reaches back.

What actually makes poetry poetry is of course impossible to define. We recognize it when we hear it when we see it but we can't define it.

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry.

A poem in form still has to have voice gesture a sense of discovery a metaphoric connection as any poetry does.

One of the most powerful devices of poetry is the use of distortions. You can go from talking about the way a minute passes to the way a century passes or a lifetime.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

I don't think American poetry has gotten any better in the past 35 years. Oddly enough creative writing programs seem to have been good for fiction and I would not have predicted that.