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I can find some way to make poetry out of my life's experiences.

I want to be a poet and have a chance to explore that and let people know what's really on my mind.

I want to be the best advocate and promoter for poetry that I can be.

To be a poet, it's a challenge to do it in poverty, to do it in wealth. To do it in the academy, to do it in a relationship where you're happy. Everything changes the game. To do it in the awkward state of love, despair, dying. You just have to work it.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

People write me from all over the country, asking me, and sometimes even telling me, what they think a poet laureate should do. I found that immensely valuable.

Anybody serious about poetry knows how hard it is to achieve anything worthwhile in it.

I've been writing a lot of poetry recently. It helps me think and work things out.