It’s the combination of the intimate and the public that I find so exciting about being poet laureate.
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.
Equality and self-determination should never be divided in the name of religious or ideological fervor.
I loved to write when I was a child. I wrote, but I always thought it was something that you did as a child, then you put away childish things.
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.
To write for PC reasons, because you think you ought to be dealing with this subject, is never going to yield anything that is really going to matter to anyone else. It has to matter to you.
I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that’s only the first step.
Can it be that even as one grows to fit the space one lives in, one cannot grow until there’s space to grow?
I didn’t know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day.
I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn’t mean they’re going to make it.
I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.
I think that you certainly don’t have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.
I’ve always felt that the poems I’ve written which have historical context are hopefully not just simply plucking something out of history and saying great, let’s write about that. In every case what has happened is that I’ve become fascinated or haunted by something and couldn’t shake it.
I think that when a poem can move readers across generations and across its specific class or race then it becomes truly classic.
I wish someone had told me that my stories are really mine to tell. In other words, anything that I think is important or that has moved me has the ability to move somebody else.
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.
I think if you put something in a file that says “war poems” or “love poems” that you already restrict the way in which the poem might move.
If I begin writing a poem that means I’m intrigued in some way by whatever it’s about and that if I’m not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can’t expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.
I’m never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I’m always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.
In fact, sometimes traveling the world is a way of not writing a poem, but it’s the quality of experience. It’s being able to experience something and when you begin to write about it be able to apply the tools that you need for writing.