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

I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

We should always do something that makes us feel like a child again. Keep learning, no matter what it is.

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.

There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry