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.