Texting - a springboard to poetry

'The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We've got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future - and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It's a kind of time capsule - it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form...

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language ... it's language as play. I think it's most obvious in music, if you look at rapping, for example, a band like Arctic Monkeys uses lyrics in a poetic way. And using words in an inventive way is at the heart of youth culture in every way...

I grew up in a bookless house - my parents didn't read poetry, so if I hadn't had the chance to experience it at school I'd never have experienced it. But I loved English, and I was very lucky in that I had inspirational English teachers, Miss Scriven and Mr Walker, and they liked us to learn poems by heart, which I found I loved doing. I'd write them out by hand, and it was that very physical act that led me to become a writer. It was quite an intimate experience of poetry, and that's what I'd like us to go back to now with children.'

Carol Ann Duffy in an interview in the Guardian