And Dad would read poetry to us. So I always liked it.

I want to leave you with a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa that speaks to transformation.

I wrote this next poem for my mother.

And I was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him.

That made an impression on me in the 1930s.

He was sending me an original poem that he had composed after our Tuesday morning together.

After his lecture, a student got up and said to him, Give us a poem.

The poem is called Libation, and it's for my friend Vusi who is in the audience here somewhere.

So let me leave you then with a few words from another poet, if you'll forgive me.

Maybe it's because Dad used to read to us at night.

The first one is dedicated to Spencer, and his grandmother, who was shocked by his work.

Poems. I have to write poems.

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry.

Li Bai's work is the most famous of Chinese poetry.

I started with a poem, I'll end with one.

A few years before he died, after he had resumed writing poetry, but in secret, he confessed to a friend in a letter that I found when I was doing my research I've written a verse.

Poetry.

I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described language as fossil poetry.

I want to end with a poem by an American poet called Lucille Clifton.

And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit?

There's a poem written by a very famous English poet at the end of the 19th century.

Poetry does that.

Marcus A modern day poet.

The Poetry of the Euro

And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Chen I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat.

I decided to write a piece for choir a couple of years later as a gift to this conductor who had changed my life.

I'm going to give you poem called Forced to Sin, which is from my album War Child.

It is a dream come true to be part of this choir, as I've never been part of one.

You don't write a psalm.

And here's her poem.

Allen is a poet.

Poetry matters.

It's a longer poem.

And the choir conductor there knew that I sang and invited me to come and join the choir.

When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken word poetry.

And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, Oh, that's what this is all about, and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.

I don't want to write that stuff.

The poem is called No Man is an Island.

He is nothing but a poet.

She wrote a lot of poems.

He is only a poet.

And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before.

I think of all the poetry that I've read about romantic love, what sums it up best is something that is said by Plato, over 2,000 years ago.

Machine a thing of beauty, and a joy forever. Perfect running.