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!

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

Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.

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.

Creative writing and literacy go hand and hand.