Nothing is too small. Nothing is too, quote-unquote, ordinary or insignificant. Those are the things that make up the measure of our days, and they're the things that sustain us. And they're the things that certainly can become worthy of poetry.

Libraries are where it all begins.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard.