Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

It's the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.

I think children have talent and insight, but it gets beaten out of them.

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible.

Everybody who's anybody longs to be a tree.

If the poem is so moving that even if you have no experience in that particular setting be it 1920's Harlem let's say. You still are so moved that you can put yourself in that position. That means that the writer has managed to go beyond the personal and touch the humanity in all of us and it's really a blast to read it because I realize how that this does hold true for the truly great poems.

Don't be so fast, you're all you've got.