Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

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

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

I think if you put something in a file that says "war poems" or "love poems" that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

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

I never think of my audience when I write a poem. I try to write out of whatever is haunting me; in order for a poem to feel authentic, I have to feel I'm treading on very dangerous ground, which can mean that the resulting revelations may prove hurtful to other people. The time for thinking about that kind of guilt or any collective sense of responsibility, however, occurs much later in the creative process, after the poem is finished.