Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free.

I intend 'Dämmerung' to be an ironic meditation on the financial rewards of poetry and a tragicomic lament on the passing of time and the changes in literary taste. The other poets mentioned are my poetic cohort from the U.K. I wrote the piece in situ, as it were, while making a television documentary about World War I in Germany.

The Huddersfield that I like best is a large town with a big heart and an open mind.

In all the poems I've written I've not really engaged in politics, and when I've found myself moving in that direction I've always stopped myself.

I once stood in the middle of New York city watching my name go round the electronic zipper sign in Times Square and I felt pretty thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as I felt when I saw my name in the Examiner for the first time.

I wondered if people might not have had enough of Simon Armitage and wondered whether I hadn't had enough of Simon Armitage.

As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.