I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

I love the feeling of creating pictures in someone's mind just by spelling out the right lyrical combination.

We came off the road of the last tour very inspired to just keep playing, so we went to Canada.

I'd written songs with lots of people, from one spectrum to the other.

I have always enjoyed different kinds of music.

I mean, Beatles songs were two and a half minutes long, and they're fantastic.

So one can say that I write all the time, that goes for the lyrics as well.

And I found that when I built my own place and just shut the door, the creativity was endless.

Everyone is really getting along with each other and we enjoy each others company and love playing live.

I write on all instruments.

I wasn't really writing with anything commercial in mind I just wanted to create some new music.

I grew up in a very musical family, my father was a musician and a big band leader and made records.

I think that the climate within the band has changed, it's now in a more functional situation.

I also write poems, so that is something that I really enjoy.

So for my studio purposes, I know that I'm in my studio with technicians who've done amazing things to my board and to my power amps and I know what I can deliver out of my studio.

So in one sense you don't have the classic keyboard player in Yes.

I know that if I went to other studios, like in Vancouver, that those are set up to be as professional and as true, so it's just a different flavour, it's a different sound, but I think both have their place.

I've had the luxury of owning my own studio, 24 analogue, 48 digital, endless effects, endless hardcore gear, that I don't have to rent, I don't get stuck with the bills, it's all mine.

So I was always around music and my dad was in his own way a progressive jazzer, a big band jazzer guy.

I love all Yes music and love to play it live, but I'm most interested in making new music with Yes.

So that studio served its purpose, and still is working very well for other people right now.

So whenever I had some in-between producing time down in my studio I popped a tape in and started working on it. Working a little bit at a time, it actually took almost four years.

When you're a songwriter and you click with someone, you tend to want to keep writing with that person.

I don't have any assistants, I do it all myself, I don't have any secretaries.

I'm very proud of it as a Yes record amongst many of the other Yes records.

Sometimes I hear a drum groove in my head and I rush down to my studio.

You know, I am just a musician and I have no idea these days what good and bad is in terms of labels.

I wrote songs with the guys from Air Supply for their record... So I was just writing songs.

It's an album that is a little bit different and probably isn't easy to get out. It's not likely that a major label would have picked it up and said that they had a smash hit record.

And as you said, everyone contributed; certain areas of material came from certain individuals.

So when bands work with me and it's 10 o'clock, usually you'd have to be getting out of the studio, we could go on until 2 in the morning cause it's my place!

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

To me many short poems read and write like beginnings that simply whet my appetite; I want to get over that.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

I like poems that are complex.

'A collected poems' is either a gravestone or a testimonial to survival.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

We have a lot of long narrative poems written in the 20th century, but they're not very well known, and they're not read by very many people.

Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

The few bad poems which occasionally are created during abstinence are of no great interest.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I wrote those poems for myself, as a way of being a soldier here in this country. I didn't know the poems would travel. I didn't go to Lebanon until two years ago, but people told me that many Arabs had memorized these poems and translated them into Arabic.

I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound.

I don't expect you'll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

If I were brave enough to say so, I'd like to think that I had written some poems that people are not going to forget.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.