Nobody really knows whether they are a poet. I knew I was interested from the age of 15.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country-it had all been done in our name. . . . The French city . . . had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.

Poetry carries its history within it, and it is oral in origin. Its transmission was oral.

A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where "open form" or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term "heightened speech".

In rap, as in most popular lyrics, a very low standard is set for rhyme; but this was not always the case with popular music.