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I write quite a lot of sonnets, and I think of them almost as prayers: short and memorable, something you can recite.

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

By the time I was seven, I did a sonnet at Shakespeare's Globe theatre for Shakespeare's birthday because my dad had been at the first season of the Globe and was friends with the artistic director. Somehow, that lead to me doing a sonnet!

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

Sometimes, when you are in a really constrained situation, it makes you more focused about what you want to say and where you're heading. The most beautiful love poems that were ever written are sonnets, composed in a very constraining form.

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.