Anyone can tell you that how you're raised as a child has a great deal to do with how you behave as an adult and whether you have complexes or whether you need to prove yourself or all that kind of stuff and yet the mother in a traditional family who has raised a child never makes it in the history books.

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

When I was young, I was older than I am today.

In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it's the quality of experience. It's being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry

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.

Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.