I wrote those poems for myself as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page. The strength of any poem is the poems that it has managed to exclude.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect because it's every day anyway no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems or sometimes not.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own but what it is I just don't know.

I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean the clues were in the poems but they didn't read them very carefully and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.

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.

It all has to do with art - writing painting things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs but they're always poems first.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it it appears to be prose but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems I would suggest you do two things: first while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

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.

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry but obviously like everybody I have a set of criteria for reading poems and I'm not shy about presenting them so if people ask for my critical response to a poem I tell them what works and why and what doesn't work and why.

Every so often I find some poems that are too good for the readers of The Atlantic because they are a little too involved with the nature of poetry as such.

Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago when books of poems were best-sellers.

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.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.