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My focus is on the reader and that the poet's job is not to inspire himself or herself. The poet's job is to inspire some future reader.

I believe the poet shouldn't be in the poem at all except as a lens or as ears.

When I became poet laureate, I was in a slightly uncomfortable position because I think a lot of poetry isn't worth reading.

I was apprehensive. I feared every time I talked about poetry, it would be filtered through the lens of race, sex, and age.

The attention one gets from being a poet isn't great.

Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

The poet is someone, I think, who's interested in registering experience immediately or giving you the sense of immediacy and directness.

The trouble with the performance poets is that they don't seem to have read anything. So there is not a real sense of the poetic tradition in their work.

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'