I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.

As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting that human thing.

For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.

I think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.