As the BBC's poet in residence he has had a key role in Windrush, the BBC season of programmes marking the 50th anniversary of of the first major wave of West Indian immigrants to the British Isles. As he said on his appointment, he hopes to persuade programme makers to include poems in cookery and gardening programmes. He also makes himself available to BBC staff for poetic guidance, during a six-month tenure funded by the Poetry Society. It's not like making a chair or painting your house, where you can say exactly how long it will take.
Poetry is organic, fluid, unpredictable.
If you go back to poems written 20 years ago, you can see where you can prune - you look at a line and it sticks out. On the other hand some poems can come like a gift. You can't tie poetry down to any time frame - sometimes you live with a poem for a week or a weekend, sometimes it comes to you and it seems as if it has written itself. As you know I grew up in Guyana. I left school in 1967, and went straight into teaching.