In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

I look for the humanity in people however big the politics or oppressive the situation may be whether it's subsumed within a human being or between two human beings. I want to help us hold a mirror to ourselves.

I don't for the life of me understand how anybody could contemplate the results of the 2000 election in the US and say that electoral politics doesn't matter any more and that Ralph Nader was right when he said there is no difference between the two parties.

London in the '70s was a pretty catastrophic dump I can tell you. We had every kind of industrial trouble we had severe energy problems we were under constant terrorist attack from Irish terrorist groups who started a bombing campaign in English cities politics were fantastically polarized between left and right.

I'm an independent. I'm a centrist. A new generation is arriving that has grown up with a multiplicity of choice in every aspect of their lives and yet politics is the last place that they are told that they should be satisfied with a choice between brand A and brand B. It doesn't fit the way they think. It doesn't fit the way they live.

One of the big changes in politics has been because families individuals have felt worried insecure... worried about the economy worried about their jobs worried about their kids' futures... actually the disconnect between the public and media discourse and people's everyday concerns has become bigger not smaller.

I like to see myself as a bridge builder that is me building bridges between people between races between cultures between politics trying to find common ground.

The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt too.

There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

I'd never really been content with just churning out these slim volumes every three or four years. I've always tried to think of poetry as an active ingredient in the language rather than just something that appears between the covers of thin books.

Well the great thing for me about poetry is that in good poems the dislocation of words that is to say the distance between what they say they're saying and what they are actually saying is at its greatest.

So poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders.

When you translate poetry in particular you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words sentences phrases the triple tension between the line of verse the syntax and the sentence.

Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones gut this is only in part true.

Living here on Earth we breathe the rhythms of a universe that extends infinitely above us. When resonant harmonies arise between this vast outer cosmos and the inner human cosmos poetry is born.

One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music.

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.