I want to see more children, not only reading books, but being able to turn the books into plays and writing their own books because I think children would enjoy reading books that are written by their own peers

Poetry helps me to imagine freedom.

Poetry can push our boundaries of “speech freedom”, which will allow us to encourage a generation of critical thinkers.

Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation.

Education would become the instrument of my liberation.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

If you think that you don’t know, you don’t know. But if you think that you may know, if you think that it’s perfectly possible that you have a knowing, then you can find it. So it’s a matter of opening. It’s a matter of releasing the structures that have been imposed upon you, realising that every form of education is an imposition that’s coming from outside your being. I think the liberating force of art and poetry is that it releases you from that, and it puts you in the place of discovering, of exploring, of acknowledging that you have senses, that you have awareness, that you perceive and are paying attention to the precise form of those perceptions. That’s the joy of the poet, the joy of the artist, to focus completely, zero in on those perceptions and see the universe expanding out of ‘a grain of sand’, as William Blake said. Everything has infinite possibilities of knowledge and that’s what it means to be human. We have been brought up to believe that the machine knows better than we do. Everybody believes that now. That’s preposterous! Machines only know how to do operations, they can’t imagine, they can’t imagine the unimagined, they can’t travel like we can to the end of the galaxies just by thinking about it. So, why are we so willing to renounce our agency as creators? That is what is troubling.

I just I felt like a freak, I guess what I'm trying to say is
I want to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can create their own space in the world

I should wish to see a world in which education aimed at mental freedom rather than at imprisoning the minds of the young in a rigid armor of dogma calculated to protect them through life against the shafts of impartial evidence.

The future of poetry should be, must be, in the hearts of children, lifting them above mean desires and helping them to believe, with Socrates, that they who have the fewest wants are nearest to the gods.

I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.

My children's books are written on the belief that every child has a talent and a passion. Each story unfolds into an adventure of nurturing that confidence until a passion blooms.

If instead of making a child stick to his books I employ him in a workshop, his hands work for the development of his mind. While he fancies himself a workman he is becoming a philosopher.

For me, poetry has been an exercise in freedom. Freedom is like a muscle-the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. Poetry can give you a sense of choice. It's free on every level. Language and memory have no price tags on them. You have limitless choices-in form, language, subject matter-that spill over into life.