It's the last day of the poetry tour, at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea. I feel relaxed, in high spirits. It's always a good place to be, and the gig's been a sell-out for months. We drive to meet Carol Ann at Swansea station. She's fresh from her journey from Manchester through the snow-lands of border country, between the hills of the English midlands and the Welsh mountains.

We arrive at the venue to a warm welcome. There's a fine art exhibition on, portraits of writers by Gordon Stuart. Carol Ann stops at the turn of the stairs to look at a terrific painting of Beryl Bainbridge. "I want to buy that," she says. It is off the wall and wrapped in a trice.

In the 'green room' we plan the reading over sandwiches and a glass of wine. The theatre is buzzing. As we always do, Carol Ann and I read 8-10 poems in turn, then the same number again. This time Carol Ann begins the evening, and I finish. She is, as always, terrific: a glance spells out the irony in a phrase, a small hand-movement signals the ambiguity of a word. There is laughter, and that velvety silence of people listening, moved.

Old friends are there, from schools visited and courses taught, and one friend from my school days. Many have never been to a reading before. Old, new: the perfect combination, and a sign that we're spreading the word. Every time someone persuades another to give it a go, we move closer to the day when poetry really does reach its audience.

I read one poem I'm not sure about, a 'prayer' for the bereaved, commissioned by the cancer charity Tenovus. It's more poem than prayer, and it does the job, but is it any good out of context? I'm surprised when we sit signing books for an hour afterwards, several people mention it as the poem of mine that most moved them.

After, we drive to Cardiff to stay overnight, and before sleep we three sit late over a bottle of Pinot noir, plotting the spread of poetry throughout the land, talking about poems we're writing. Up early to take the Laureate to Cardiff Central. "Fablus!" she says. She's learning the lingo.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke wrote for us during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales. With thanks to Academi.

Another veil of snow, and all has turned to ice. It's very, very cold. People phone: 'Is the reading still on? Are you going?' Of course! Try and stop me.

The Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, is on the train from Manchester. The coldest November for decades would not stop her keeping her promise. The car takes the first icy hill in the helpful tracks of tractors. After the mile to Post Bach, the A486 is clear. Kites are aloft, flying in pairs and in fours, scanning the land for carrion.

David drops me at the library and goes to meet Carol Ann's train. Aberystwyth looks gorgeous, the town spread below, the great library building high above the sea, the curve of Cardigan Bay against miles of snow covered mountains. We take it in joyfully, then retreat for a warming bowl of broccoli and stilton soup, bread and cheese, in the National Library café.

The Drwm is drumming with life as we enter. The audience applauds, and I feel like applauding them too for coming through ice and snow to be with us. Fifty per cent of the atmosphere of every good poetry reading is created by the audience. The circular shape of the Drwm helps too, a cosy, enclosing arena that seats 100 people.

Rocet Arwel Jones introduces us eloquently, and Dafydd John Pritchard reads a special poem written in response to Carol Ann's The World's Wife. The perfect Welsh introduction. A full house, an audience alert to the movements between solemn and light moments. These are what a good audience gives to make a warm afternoon in a cold world. We rise to the occasion, enjoying ourselves.

There is no strain in communicating music, meaning and perhaps magic to such a gathering. Carol Ann reads some of her innovative new bee poems, the movingly beautiful elegies and remembrances to her mother, poems of war (Afghanistan, and older wars recalled). Her litanies come close to inventing a new form, using a historically sacred form to weave the ordinary with the epic.

The audience love John Barleycorn, listing old pub names, and her rebuke to Royal Mail for abolishing the poetry of county names in favour of postcodes only. Try replacing 'all the birds of Oxfordshire' etc with 'all the birds of CF11', or equivalent! Turn in your grave, Edward Thomas. I read mostly unpublished poems, a new Carol of the Birds, and a few old ones to mark the season of Advent.

Afterwards we linger to talk with old friends, people we've tutored at Ty Newydd, met at other gigs. Then an elegant bone china cup of tea and a slice of home-made lemon cake with friends in St David's Road, and off to the station for the little train which will carry Carol Ann across the icy map of mid-Wales, where, in the night, the temperature at Llysdinam plunges to -18 celsius.

Another typical Welsh gig, as Carol Ann would say.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke is blogging for the BBC during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales, which runs until 10 December 2010. For more information on the National Poet's tour of Wales visit the Academi website.

Snow! Just a veil in Ceredigion as we set off for Carmarthen, a completely white world as I write at Blaen Cwrt on Friday morning. Serious snow, crisp and deep and even.

Though only November, it's very cold. For me and Menna Elfyn, sharing the stage tonight, it's just 10 days and 28 degrees Celsius between tropical Kerala and frozen Carmarthen.

There are similarities too. A warm, intelligent audience of readers and writers, a bilingual event, poetry and debate. This time it's in Trinity – now known as Trinity St David's. The Academi banner is resplendent, the bookstall set out, Menna there to welcome me. The room is soon buzzing with talk and arrivals.

In a way it's a homecoming, county of my father's and grandfather's birth. In nearby Llangynog, my great-grandfather and nine of his children are buried. The room fills, an audience of Trinity-St.D students, past students and staff, townspeople, and brave pilgrims from snowy Pembrokeshire and upland Carmarthenshire. Oh, and a very small dog in a handbag.

Later I meet people from my past: a teacher, a theatre student who 'did my poems' for her GCSE in Bath, and attended Poetry Live, people who've enjoyed courses at Ty Newydd. Poetry usually draws its audience from the wide stage of poetry. Afterwards people say: 'You won't remember me...' But I usually do.

Menna reads first, weaving between Welsh and English so the audience experience both the pleasures of meaning and sound, whether Welsh speaking or not. I read recent poems, most written to commission or at someone's request.

The audience questions the Muse versus the Commission. I say that there is usually a queue of ideas and an untapped oil-well of creative energy, so putting the two together will usually make a poem happen. Nobody knows where a poem comes from anyway.

Sometimes it's as if you dreamed it, and it has nothing at all to do with you. Or you research a subject and find a new field and a fresh vocabulary. A commission and a deadline make good discipline for a writer.

We discuss translation. I believe translation is very important to the culture of a multilingual world. Without it we would not share the Bible, the Koran, Chekhov, Pushkin, fairy stories and ancient mythologies, and the world would not have Shakespeare.

When you translate a poem you must make a new poem. You keep the meaning and lose the music, so you must make up for the loss by making a new music in the translation. It's better than nothing. Menna and I have translated many of each other's poems, so we know what is lost, what is gained. Someone once called it 'unfaithful beauty'.

I stroke the dog in the handbag, and we drive home to a very late supper of, not poetry (RS Thomas had Poetry for Supper) but ravioli and a mug of tea.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke is blogging for the BBC during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales, which runs until 10 December 2010. For more information on the National Poet's tour of Wales visit the Academi website.

We pass over Mosul, Baghdad, Basra. I disobey the air hostess and lift my blind. I want to see the world, snow-capped mountains south of Turkey, the sunrise.

At Doha I wait four hours for the flight to Thiruvananthapuram. The language is Mayalam, and I determine not to use the shorter, British name. The terminal is full of white-robed, bearded men with mobile phones, each wearing a plastic identification tag on a ribbon, their black-veiled wives like drifting, elegant columns. They are on their way to Mecca for the Hajj, the biggest pilgrimage in the world.

After touch-down in Thiruvananthapuram – I’m learning to say this – I step from the building into an oven, dizzy after 24 hours awake. I share the car with Miguel from the Phillipines and Jorges from Mexico.

The drive to the hotel is noisy, the horn, and everyone else’s horn, honking every two seconds as we dodge pedestrians, dogs, bicycles, motor bikes, motor rickshaws, lorries, cars along the route. It runs between palm forests lined with brilliantly coloured villas side by side with slum-dwellings, shacks, sheds, shops, factories, the hugger-mugger life of the people at the roadside.

In a few days I get used to the clutter and begin to see the detail, egrets picking beside tethered cows, a flight of hoopoes over the yellow waters of the Karamana river, old women hacking coconuts at the roadside, an impeccably uniformed child walking to school. Kerala, despite the obvious poverty, has 100% literacy.

I love my cool room at the hotel, a little house in a tropical garden of giant palms and banana leaves like the paddles of giant boats. I share my garden with chipmunks, lizards, kites, crows, crickets, a little black snake.

The festival at the Kanakakunnu Palace is a wonder, thronged with people thrilled to have it in their city. I have three events – In Conversation with Indian writer CP Surendran; a six-minute spot at the Gala Reading; and a stage discussion on bilingualism with Menna Elfyn, Paul Henry, and two Indian poets, one who writes in English, one in Mayalam.

We are joined by a young poet, Soni, who’s become my friend through email. He is invited to read a poem he wrote last night at the close of the day. It’s a lovely poem. He’s in a wheelchair, and we use the angel-wings of four beautiful men (they are all beautiful here) to fly him up the steps into the venue. At all events audience participation is lively. We conclude that the true international language is poetry itself.

Back in Wales emails fly in from my new friends, new readers, and a message and a new poem from Soni. What a wonder the web is! It brings us together like the angels who bore Soni in his chair into the bardic circle.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke is blogging for the BBC during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales, which runs until 10 December 2010. For more information on the National Poet’s tour of Wales visit the Academi website.

The drive north from Ceredigion is glorious. Vast rain-clouds peel off the Irish Sea, sweeping east and leaving a clear blue sky. From the moment we turn inland at Aberystwyth, the mountains are red with bracken, trees turning gold, with the most intense rainbow I ever remember over the slate grey town of Blaenau Ffestiniog. The room in the Gwydyr Hotel awaits.

Dwynwen from Llanrwst sets out her stall of books for sale, the Academi banner is hung. We talk over high tea, egg and chips and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc.

The usual early birds don’t arrive. Fearing the worst, Ifor and I prepare for a change of plan. We abandon the lectern, draw comfortable chairs close, and wait. In the event we’re not a crowd but an intimate group, which has its own charm.

Ifor and I read a few poems a time, responding to each other, matching poem to poem. He has prepared translations to hand to the audience, and reads in Welsh and in English, weaving between the two as nimbly as a sheepdog.

One curious fact: I am exhausted! It takes far more energy to communicate poetry to a few in a big room than to light the spark with a full house of adults, or an audience of 2000 teenagers.

Thursday 21st October - off to Builth Wells to read at the Wyeside Centre with Paul Henry. I am as confident in Paul as I was in Ifor, but success lies with the audience. They can make or break the magic, so I’m nervous.

Again, the drive is beautiful, 60 miles through red mountains even rosier in the light of a low sun, with sudden visions of yellow – a golden tree, a sunlit slope. Is there a lovelier season to travel through Wales?

I need not have worried. It turns out to be a great evening. Builth is a town with a heart, a feeling of community, and the Royal Welsh has established a habit of gathering. In the excellent High School poetry is valued in English and in Welsh.

The venue is warm, arty, purposeful, and as we arrive people are gathering in the bar. The little theatre space is comfortably full. People have come from Hereford, Presteigne, Cardiff. Paul is funny, warm, and moving too, and the lovely audience makes the magic happen.

Phew! What a relief! There’s a long and winding road to go before Christmas.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke is blogging for the BBC during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales, which runs until 10 December 2010. For more information on the National Poet’s tour of Wales visit the Academi website.

I'm leaving home a few days at a time, gigging with some of my favourite poets. I chose them because they're all fine poets, brilliant readers and communicators. Goodbye bad old days when I'd sneak a look at my watch as another poet took a sip of beer before losing his page then mumbling his latest epic, already well over his time announcing, 'Just one more.'

This tour, I determined, would be professional, choreographed. First event, the Abergavenny Food Festival, with Carol Ann Duffy at the Queen's Hotel. Would it go well? Would a food festival audience come for poetry? The Poet Laureate has long experience of reading in Wales, impressed by our deep-rooted poetry tradition. But I want more than tradition. I want to reach our potential audience with the best poets, excellent readings in full venues, and tonight to be the start of it.

Advance ticket sales are good. Crowds gather in the Queen's Hotel. The ballroom is dazzling. The chandeliers are upside-down ice-cream cones, melting. Abergavenny does us proud. A sell-out! Carol Ann reads from The World's Wife to a delighted crowd. I choose food-poems. The response is warm, the applause long. Afterwards the bookshop does a brisk trade as we sit signing and meeting the audience. Carol Ann takes it for granted - 'Typical Welsh gig,' she says.

Next, I sing for my supper and more at the Bell at Skenfrith. Pure delight! Our room looks across the bridge over the Monnow to England. The food is local, the chef passionate, the vegetables from their beautiful organic garden. I'm obliged to interrupt the lunch-guests in each dining area with a reading, but they seem to appreciate a food-poem between courses. 'Your poem made me cry,' someone said!

The next one will be at Betws-y-Coed with Ifor ap Glyn, who was wonderful with American audiences in Washington DC last year. This one's Welsh and English. Cross fingers for a good house. I want poetry to be a universal pleasure, the food of love and other human passions. I want it to surprise people as if they were children again, brought to laughter and tears by words.

Gillian Clarke
National Poet of Wales

Gillian Clarke is blogging for the BBC during her seven-date poetry tour of Wales, which runs until 10 December 2010. For more information on the tour visit the Academi website.