People feel politics isn't about their lives.

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.

No matter where I go - London Beirut Jerusalem Washington Beijing or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better not pull them apart.

It is the belief that extremes and excesses of inequality must be reduced so that each person is free to fully develop his or her full potential. This is why we take precious time out of our lives and give it to politics.

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives a politics that does not speak to and include people is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

The other side of it is that despite all that people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

Naming a baby is an act of poetry for many people the only creative moment of their lives.

My obsession with time informs my poetry so completely it is hard for me to summarize it. We want time to pass for new things to happen to us we want to hold on to certain moments we don't want our lives to end.

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan.

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being to which we rarely penetrate for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.