It seems to be the thing now that young people are getting back into politics.

I get asked a lot about getting into politics. I say 'Take a look at politics. You tell me what seems appealing about that.'

To balance China the democracies will need new friends - and India with its fast-growing economy youthful population and democratic politics seems the obvious candidate.

It would be great if politics were fact-based but it is not and it is surely not nuance-based. What works in a classroom or a think tank does not work on Capitol Hill or in the White House. Obama sometimes seems to be running the Brookings Institution not the country.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared. And the country's scared.

Politics it seems to me for years or all too long has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

That's the way it is with poetry: When it is incomprehensible it seems profound and when you understand it it is only ridiculous.

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.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write but it's not.