2) Can you talk about how poetry can, should, might inform the task of the novelist, and what it’s like to move between these forms. Do you think poets in general make for successful novelists?

JB: Hardly. D.H. Lawrence could do it, though. Thomas Hardy, too. Of course, there will always be novelists who trade on their fame to publish bad poetry. I think the transition is easier from poetry to fiction than from fiction to poetry. Although, of course, the best writing is simply writing — and equally good however it is placed. For me, I began with poetry, and I think that what helps me is that I try to accomplish particular things in verse — I think of the best poetry as manuals of thought. The greatest foolishness at the present time, though, are the legions of novelists who do not READ poetry. That would have been a preposterous idea one hundred years ago — a person would have looked like an ass for making that claim. However, I have heard writers say that to a whole room of people with no shame whatsoever. And, I must say, the shame of not reading poetry is a deeply personal one. You are giving up one of the world’s tools, and what you find there you won’t find anywhere else.

I love it when you ask me questions. I think my first sally in that wine-fuelled conversation would be that there is no earthly way of actually knowing, and that the question might need to be whittled down a little bit. Like, 'Do published poets write better prose than novelists?' or 'Do people best known for writing poetry write better prose…?' or 'Can some writers just annoying do most anything they want to?'

My new year's resolution is to read more poetry so hopefully I will be good value in that chat.

Nico, I'm not very good at doing 'research' before I go overseas. I borrowed this from a fellow traveller. But if you're still interested, there were listings in the back of our Lonely Planet and Rough Guide guidebooks for fiction and non-fiction books to do with Sri Lanka. Michelle de Kretser's The Hamilton Case is also set in Sri Lanka, I think, but the guy who lent me this didn't really like it.