To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.

We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

What is ironic is that Allen Ginsberg's importance was in its twilight for so many years that it took his death to bring it to the front page. He electrified an entire world!

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.

Courage has nothing to do with our determination to be great. It has to do with what we decide in that moment when we are called upon to be more.

If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.