I'm sorry to read of the spat between Joe Simpson and the teenagers who study his book. Trading insults is not the way forward. It isn't funny. It's painful. As a syllabus poet, I perform with Poetry Live, and am in touch with thousands of teenagers. No doubt some of the applause we receive is ironic, but after the events many email to say they had a good day, and that poetry is not boring after all. I can tell by the spelling they aren't all A* students.

Every week, except in the summer holidays, teenagers email me questions via a form-filler on my website. I answer the polite ones, as most of them are. One message began as a question then exploded into: "I hate poetry I hate you and I hate Mrs Burton and Mr Richards too." I imagined the thrown book, the kicked furniture, the smashed mug, maybe tears. Poor lad! I sent him a calm reply.

One year I made the mistake of going to France in the weeks leading to the GCSE English exam. I sat in the shade of a fig tree every morning, answering their last-minute questions. Sometimes a student's question is so perceptive that it is a revelation, uncovering layers of meaning in the language. I'm only the poet. I need you, the reader.

Of thousands of emails I've received, just a handful have been offensive. I don't reply to those, hiding behind the firewall of the form-filler. I regard answering students' questions as a teaching job, pay-back for the good teaching I had. I direct students with the simplest questions to prepared notes on my website. One poem, set for the international GCSE English exam, brings questions from all over the world, just recently from Kuwait, Dubai, Mumbai, Pakistan, Ghana, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, China, Bahrain.

The poem is called Lament, written at the time of the first Gulf war. Last summer Emmanuel Owoniyi, of Accra, Ghana, wrote to me: "Lament got me raise my hand in lit. class and actually say someth that made sense in d class.... Thx 4 lament."

I responded, saying I hoped he'd raise his hand in lit class every time he had an idea. A few days later I had another message from Emmanuel: "I got homework please.?? Quote: 'read the poem 'lament', comment on the tone. Is it sad or angry, does it change as the progresses. Show how the poet (thats you :) communicates to you'. i am nt that good in lit. I will really appreciate it if you help me here."

I sent Emmanuel a little poetry lesson. He's probably in a class of 60 or more. I hope he got a good grade.

Last year I was in correspondence with Yasmeen Khan, a teacher from Mianwali in Pakistan. Yasmeen's class wanted help with my poem, The Field Mouse, written at the time of the Bosnian war. The poem is set in the countryside of Ceredigion where we were hay-making with the family on a summer day. At the same time, in the countryside of another part of Europe, war was raging, and perhaps at that very hour nearly 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered in Srebrenica. When at last Ratko Mladic, accused of being responsible for that genocide, was taken into custody and sent to the Hague to await trial, the poem, studied by GCSE students for years, seemed suddenly to have gained new meaning.

Yasmeen's last communication concluded: "I could teach them peace through your poem. Thanks and love from all of us. Yasmeen."

That's what poetry's for. Maybe communication is easier for a poet. Poems are short, one human being's experience shared with another across nations and generations. I don't tweet. Email is more personal, more responsible, more human, each one a letter with wings. Insulting ones burn up in space and become black holes.

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