Crassly put: When I write, I am trying not to bore myself and my readers.

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

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

If our children are unable to voice what they mean, no one will know how they feel. If they can’t imagine a different world, they are stumbling through a darkness made all the more sinister by its lack of reference points. For a young person growing up in America’s alienated neighborhoods, there can be no greater empowerment than to dare to speak from the heart — and then to discover that one is not alone in ones feelings.

My best times are midnight to six actually. I'll leaf through my notebooks and if something catches my eye and I feel like I want to transfer it from the notebook to the page, I do, and then comes this very strange process which is difficult to describe in that I'll write until I get stuck or I can't go any further or I'm boring myself or whatever and then I might go to another poem.

I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned.