My first advice would be to read, read, read, which sounds interesting coming in a digital age, but it's so much easier to listen to a poem than it is to sit down and actually read it and to hear it in your head and that is something that every poet or aspiring poet needs to be able to do, I think to hear it in their head.

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

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.

If you can't be free, be a mystery.

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

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

If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.