Music and songs have always been a constant part of my life, and still are. My brother Michael, who is a songwriter and composer, is the one who most fully inherited the musical legacy of our family, but I got some part of it - mostly the feel.

Today is such a strange day. The news is out about the Russians and mini-Donald. This seems like a turning point, but it certainly has felt that way before. Like all of us, I am vibrating with electric uncertainty. How do you manage to concentrate and write poems? I know that for me it is just a relief to be in that sort of thinking, away from the news and all the immense global and personal worries.

Thinking in prose is different. I gained an immense amount of respect for people who write prose, and also felt even more sure that the thinking particular to poetry is essential to my life. I need to think, to explore, to question, in poetry. Without that feeling, I am, in some ultimate way, lost.

I feel because I am never in my comfort zone I have an advantage.

Something can be symbolic without being a mere stand-in or vessel, which just brings us away from the true mystery and dread, into some boring version of what we already know. So what you say is true, in that the bear is a kind of parallel to the speaker, or imagined as such, but also very different. So if it's a symbol it is - ahem - a polysemous one.

Mimesis has longevity on its side. But Oasis wrote two of the greatest pop songs of all time, each with lyrics that mean less and less the more you think about them. So I'm going to have to go with the Gallagher brothers.

All my closest friends came to me through poetry. My wife, too! Other than my family, poetry is the gravitational force of my life.