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.

Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.

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

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.

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