Stories - Five Minutes With

"The poets have an important role in shaping the future of humanity as they are the frontiers of human conscience."

"In my humble opinion, a barometer for a country’s intelligence, liberalism and progress can be gauged by whether it allocates public funding towards developing its poets and poetry, without placing any curbs on freedom of expression."

"My father wrote letters to the editor. I write poems. I hope they have influenced people for the better."

"There is an imperfect fit between our perceptions, actuality, and articulation. Poetry for me fills up this gap or at least gives an identity to it."

"It's always better to let the poems soak the energy around and emerge as ripe, mature produce. Haste destroys its texture and taste."

"I write wrinkled words of primal prayers–bleached with white light, a fantasy landscape seen through half-sleep and eyelashes, turning my face away from my prelapsarian shadows of shame and guilt."

"We need to open up the minds of children with poems that are not just playful or lyrical but poems that encourage enquiry, poems that discourage war and violence (not celebrate them), poems of peace, the joys of co-existence and compassion."

"I do not think war or conflict will end simply because poets are talking about the need for peace, but certainly they hold a mirror to what many people believe but sometimes find difficult to say."

"Poetry will not save the world but it can save the poet from damnation. To that extent, it has a role. A limited one."