Once you have a disease like cancer, you look at life a bit differently. Some things that were important no longer seem as important as they were.

That the language of the poetry of Jamaican music is rastafarian or biblical language cannot simply be put down to the colonizer and his satanic missionaries. The fact is that the historical experience of the black Jamaican is an experience of the most acute human suffering, desolation and despair in the cruel world that is the colonial world.

Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon.

The more I read my poems, the more I find out about them. I still read them with the same passion I felt when I wrote them as a young man.

I don't go to see bands any more because I've got tinnitus, so I have to avoid loud music. You get used to it, but when it's quiet you hear a constant ringing.

I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.

I have never, ever sought validation from the arbiters of British poetic taste.