So you have in Iraq some people falling prey to the system, some people managing to negotiate independence, and other people becoming outlaws, and being imprisoned and dying. You have all sorts. I don't know any other society where poetry has such a place.

You always have regime-friendly poets like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, whose career basically spans the twentieth century. He's an anti-imperialist, friendly with the Communists, and somehow survives all that and is shuttling between Baghdad and Damascus depending on which way the winds are blowing with the Baathists and their competition. But he's not a regime stooge, he's independent.

Culture is invited to the table usually only as raw material that needs no analysis.

Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.

In trying to imagine this world, I kept coming back to Michel Aflaq. He's a Christian Arab, a Syrian, who ends up finding his home in Iraq and is buried there - I was stunned to see his tomb is right smack down in the Green Zone.

Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.

It does not take much to imagine the humanity of people you don't know. An American author does not need to know a word of Arabic to write a book like the one I wrote.