I think poetry can be a kind of secular way in which people can be led to approach the difficult parts of their life, where there's been loss, where there's sadness of a deep kind. If poetry can help people to be more at ease in expressing even to themselves a lot of the darkness and pain of ordinary human existence, then it's serving some kind of cultural role, perhaps more than a cultural role, perhaps it is serving something of a spiritual role.

I'm trying to do what Eddie Murphy did for his generation. You have to show people, 'I'm different. I'm not just a comedian.' I'm trying to become a rock star.

There's so much you can achieve with a launching pad like stand-up comedy. You can literally go from acting to hosting to being a personality.

People don't want to hear about me having leather walls or gold toilets.

Often poetry, especially the sort of poetry I write, is concerned with looking at the borders between the sensual and the spiritual and seeing them as divided, equivocal, that mystery somehow can break in to the ordinary. And we read poetry I think in part, to gain a sense of that intimacy with things that we can't understand that are unable to be understood but that buoy up our lives.

My brother tried to explain sex to me when I was 7 - and he did it with a cup.

When I was married, I definitely went through a lying period.