WHAT ARE YOU READING?

I am primarily a futurist ... so to get information I have to scan — I do a lot of environmental scanning — so in fact I read all the time. But I don't read fiction. I generally don't like fiction because I find it very boring. I read reviews about fiction so I know generally what's being written, but I don't spend any time at all reading fiction itself. I read poetry though, every day. I like words and ideas — it's not that I don't. In my general scanning, I like to read poems that are in the magazines I read. I also get the "Best American Poetry 2006" and that sort of stuff, that gives me a collection of what somebody thinks is good poetry.

WHAT DOES POETRY OFFER THAT FICTION DOESN'T?

It's the brevity, the conciseness. It's agonizing over the right word. I don't really like rhyme poetry for the most part, but the rhyme constrains what you could do, which is part of the challenge of it ... so that's sort of interesting. But in so-called modern poetry, where you're not constrained by rhyme or meter — I don't know, it's a mystical experience. ... I basically think that the world is absurd, and we run around trying to give meaning to the world in its absurdity. Poets do it so well, in my opinion.

ARE YOU GETTING YOUR FILL OF IT BECAUSE IN THE FUTURE POETRY AND WRITING WILL BE REPLACED BY INTERACTIVE AUDIO-VISUAL TECHNOLOGY?

I spend a lot of time looking at the relationship between technology and social change. ... It almost never vanishes entirely. It's put in its proper place. It does what it continues to do best and doesn't have to do the things it had to do simply because there wasn't technology available to do it. ... We still speak even though we can write, so writing will remain but it will not dominate in the ways it does at the present time, I suspect. But, I don't really know the future.