We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there's a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry.poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.

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!

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

At the very beginning when I begin writing a poem I try not to think of the audience or anyone at all except for trying to get at the very center of what is driving that poem. In a way it's like analyzing myself.

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

If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer

I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry.