My childhood library was small enough not to be intimidating. And yet I felt the whole world was contained in those two rooms. I could walk any aisle and smell wisdom.

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

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

The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world -- just the world as you think you know it.

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

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing

If the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920's Harlem let's say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it's really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems.