My inspiration comes from everywhere, just walking down the street and I never know where it's going to come from, so I keep a notebook with me at all times and the only criteria for anything making it into that notebook is if it stops me in my tracks for even an instant, if it catches my eye or my ear and I just write it down.

My father is a chemist, my mother was a homemaker. My parents instilled in us the feeling that learning was the most exciting thing that could happen to you, and it never ends.

What's a word, a talisman, to hold against the world?

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

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

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

Libraries are where it all begins.