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.

We still need a voice that thinks before it speaks.

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.

You’re beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

Killing time in the precinct, I find a copy of one of my early volumes in a dump-bin on the pavement outside the charity shop. The price is 10p. It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, "To mum and dad".

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.