Andrew Motion was in a rush. Just back from the United States, he was shortly off out and didn't expect to be home until midnight.

Being Poet Laureate - a job he accepted after the death of Ted Hughes in 1998 - means, I suppose, that he is constantly in demand?

"When I was appointed seven years ago I divided it into two bits: writing and doing. There is no job description.

"It means writing about events in the royal calendar such as the marriage of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles. Then for the Queen's 80th birthday I wrote a piece that was set to music by Peter Maxwell-Davies and was performed at the Proms.

"I try to make these poems part of the wider experience of Englishness and what's happening in national life at any given moment.

"Then I am sometimes commissioned to write poems. English Heritage asked for a poem on the theme of English parish churches.

"On the doing side, which hasn't quite been addressed before, I have spent a great deal of time going round schools running workshops, talking about poetry, and I spend a lot of time sitting on committees to do with education promoting poems.

"A couple of things I have managed to start is Writing Together, which aims to get poets into schools on a regular basis, and Poetry Archive, where poets record their own work," he said.

He's actually a professor who taught English at Hull University, where he met the late Philip Larkin, and whose poems and biographies over the last 30 years have won seven literary awards. The last was the 1993 Whitbread Biography Award for his life of Philip Larkin.

Fifty-four later this month, he will doubtless bring to Ilkley his short novel, The Invention of Dr Cake, his recently published memoir of childhood, In the Blood, and the Faber edition of his selected poems 1976-1997.

I asked him to explain what conceivable purpose poetry could serve in an age obsessed with consumerism and television game shows.

"Poetry can provide alternatives to consumerism and game shows. It can take us to deep places in ourselves and take us out into the world to explain how we live. Poetry offers us different values. I think poetry is a kind of sanity"

Conscious that he was probably thinking about leaving the house and getting to his next appointment in good time, I made my last question about his own poetry.

He once said that his ambition was to make his poetry as "clear as water". Looking through the Faber volume, I was struck by the poems about water, especially the one entitled Fresh Water, an eight-page poem on the theme of the River Thames.

"I seem to be very drawn to writing about water. I don't know why. It's the sensuousness of water. It seeps into things, like poetry. I am also a passionate fly fisherman," he said.

Then he'll enjoy being in the Ilkley countryside next week, providing he has the time to enjoy it.

l Andrew Motion is at the Ilkley Literature Festival - at the King's Hall - on Thursday, October 12, starting at 7.30pm. The booking office number is (01943) 816714 or visit www.ilkleyliteraturefestival.org.uk.