I know when I go to a poetry reading, I feel purged, exulted. You let the poet guide you through some kind of journey.

I want the poem to be an experience - for both the listener and for myself.

I get worked up over an 'idea' or the ethos of an idea. I follow dreams, take notes on travels, and engage in research often - if I need names, details, facts that enhance the project.

When I attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, I was very inspired. The collaboration of many poets from these alternative traditions - though there were not enough women - who were very much more influenced by, say, Asian forms or by Mantra or by thinking politically through their work in deeper ways really stuck with me.

You know, Chevron - we don't do original research on climate change. It's the government's role to do that, and we accept the determinations that are there.

In tough times, some of us see protecting the climate as a luxury, but that's an outdated 20th-century worldview from a time when we thought industrialization was the end goal, waste was growth, and wealth meant a thick haze of air pollution.

We have to use every tool at our disposal and that's why we're trialing a badger cull. We need healthy wildlife living alongside healthy cattle. Only if we work to eradicate the reservoir of TB in our badgers, will we have the strong and prosperous dairy industry the public wishes to see.

If the scale of gas is anything like the claims made by its advocates, it has major implications for the economy and British society. Besides its worrying environmental aspects, it could have adverse effects on income distribution.