If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children things that touch your soul.

All the modern verse plays they're terrible they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

Short fiction is the medium I love the most because it requires that I bring everything I've learned about poetry - the concision the ability to say something as vividly as possible - but also the ability to create a narrative that though lacking a novel's length satisfies the reader.

Probably induced by the asthma I started reading and writing early on my literary efforts from the age of about nine running chiefly to poetry and plays.

I think there's no excuse for the American poetry reader not knowing a good deal about what is going on in the rest of the world.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have as far as I can see come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

At this point we've answered about every question you could possibly imagine about Deep Space Nine so we do this thing called Theatrical Jazz where we do a show of bits and pieces of things from plays and literature poetry... stuff that we like. It's fun.

The whole thing about making films in an organic film on location is that it's not all about characters relationships and themes it's also about place and the poetry of place. It's about the spirit of what you find the accidents of what you stumble across.

That's one of the great things about poetry one realises that one does one's little turn - that you're just part of the great crop as it were.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary the only home.