People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

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

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there's space to grow?

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

Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.

I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing.