There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.

Instead of trying to come up and pontificate on what literature is, you need to talk with children, to teachers, and make sure they get poetry in the curriculum early.

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

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

Listen how they say your name. If they can't say that right, there's no way they're going to know how to treat you proper, neither.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing

It's unfortunate that sometimes in schools, there's this need to have things quantified and graded.