It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.

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

I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

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

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.