My books are flags in the mountainside. I have another flag in broadcasting, another in public art, another in performance, in plays, in television, in music. I am the first of my generation, of the contemporary poets, to make poetry as public art. Today in England it is normal, but it wasn’t in 1992. I started Landmark poetry with Hardy’s Well, in Manchester. My central influence is Ian Hamilton Finlay. I released an album in Germany, Disjam Phuturing Lemn Sissay.

By the age of thirty-two I’d found and visited all my family. I had travelled the world to find them: Ethiopia, Senegal, America, Europe. I had travelled the world to perform too.

‘It’s not difficult to be funny in poetry on stage. Just set up a false idea of what poetry is and then ridicule it, set up a false idea of what an audience is and then ridicule them – they’ll love it.’

A new generation of poets were emerging out of their teens. A few years passed. I met Jamie Byng when filming a poem in the Spiegeltent at Edinburgh International Book Festival in 1994. The title of the poem was ‘Gold From The Stone’. Jamie became the CEO of Canongate Books where he founded an imprint, Payback Press. The second syllable in ‘Rebel Without Applause’ rhymes with swell. Rebel. Rebel without applause. In the same year Bloomsbury published my children’s book The Emperor’s Watchmaker. In 2000 my next book Morning Breaks In The Elevator was published by Canongate. It sold out. Both these books are in print to this day.

‘If you are searching for your family the search begins when you find them.’

I’ve my own journey and it is unique. My conversation has not been with the gatekeepers or the ivory towers. Why would you storm an ivory tower unless you wanted to build one yourself? There are gatekeepers though. They need you to want to go through their gate. The more you want to go through their gate the more real their gate becomes. Poetry belongs in the world. The world belongs in poetry. I have always thought that way. I have always been that way.

‘I’ve never thought of the artist’s career as up or down. I see our careers as orbits. Each orbit is unique.’

So we come to my last book Listener. It was published by Canongate in 2008. It has a killer cover by Rankin. But the book is a third too big. And for that I apologise. I’ve always wanted to apologise for it.