Dealing with politically-engaged writers of color like Abdellatif Laâbi and Rashid Boudjedra - who ran away from school aged sixteen to fight against the French in the Algerian war - first requires convincing an editor to take a chance on them, which very few like to do these days.

Most of us have been subjected to terrible political poetry at least once or twice in our lifetimes, and so we tend to shy away from it.

I came to poetry at fourteen, in the middle of a booming oil-rush town in southern Arabia without a single public library: Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. All the wealth in the world and not a single intelligent idea as to how to employ it.

To be a political poet means simply to be a poet, and any poet worth their salt will be a political animal in their own peculiar way - they have no choice: politics is one of the many fragments we thread into the tapestry of the poem.

I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.

I'm of the opinion that poetry is always political, and cannot help but be so, regardless of the poet's intent, given that refusing to deal in politics is in itself a political act.

One cannot simply decide to write apolitical poetry, in the way one decides to drink lemonade instead of tea, it's far more subliminal than that.