Great Regulars: But preserving the childlikeness, the great problem,

I think, for every writer as they get older, but perhaps especially for people who volunteer to put themselves in the front line in the way that you and I have done and articulate all the time every day our ideas about poetry, about poetry's merits and values and all these things, is that the saying of it invades the quiet, and in a crucial sense, unthinking bit of our minds, which is so crucially the place that the poems originate in. The whole business of getting older is about becoming, among other things, is about becoming more worldy wise, more expressive about the things that happens to us. That's not good for writing, becuase it distorts the balance between the known and the unknown, the sayable and the difficult to say in our make-up.

from Andrew Motion: The Guardian: Andrew Motion and Michael Rosen on children's poetry

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Last month over 150,000 people were using it in a regular way--by which I mean not just people logging on thinking it was something to do with poultry--they really meant to be there.

This new fangled thing the web has established two very beautiful ancient truths about poetry--one is that people like listening to it and reading it, and the other is that a poem has as much to do with the sound it makes as it does with what the words mean on the page.

from Andrew Motion: BBC News: Last words of a Laureate: Motion bows out

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Only a certain precision and delicacy in the diction, and the occasional slight swelling of tension at line-endings, distinguish the poem from prose – but do so securely. Truth to memory of the repeated, unvarying event is the only 'effect' the poem reaches for, preparing in this way for the quietly visionary close and the sense of reality altered for ever. Here, it is only the 'big green metal grass-basket' that declares itself 'By Royal Appointment'.

The Mower

from Andrew Motion: The Times Literary Supplement: The Mower

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Andrew Motion's 'Recession' poem:

Poor Alistair Darling's new budget

from Telegraph: Poet Laureate Andrew Motion laments burden of recession in new poem

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