I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.

I write short stories, and I wrote a play.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

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

Listen how they say your name. If they can't say that right, there's no way they're going to know how to treat you proper, neither.

I was appointed Poet Laureate. It came totally out of the blue because most Poet Laureates had been considerably older than I. It was not something that I even had begun to dream about!

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