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" For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit. "

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" Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect. "

" A poem, necessarily, sits at a register that's different from our usual conversational voices. You have to listen more actively to get to the heart of what's being said, what you as a reader or listener are being asked to feel or notice. "

" I had to say to myself, 'I haven't written enough about blackness, yet it's part of my consciousness and my lived experience.' I had to get over that anxiety of 'I haven't done this before.' "

" Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it. "

" I have three kids, so children's literature is a big part of my life. "

" Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious. "

" Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems. "

" I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. "

" When I first became brave enough to tell people that I wrote poems, so many people would rave to me about Edna St. Vincent Millay's work. I was embarrassed not to have read her, and I think that put me off from reading her for a long time. So many of her poems are just impeccable. "

" A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea. "

" What excites me is that I'm an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life. I think that's good news. "

" I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life. "

" As I've been teaching longer and longer, I realize I learn so much from the voices I'm naturally drawn to, the writers I love on an instinctive level - but I also learn so much from the writers that I have to work to grasp. "

" For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense. "

" I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books. "

" History is a heavy thing everywhere. "

" Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat. "

" I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful. "

" I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire. "

" I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them. "

" I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to. "

" One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music, and image - things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why - is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective. "

" When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents. "

" Jacqueline Woodson's books are such a gift to parents and children for their poignant subtlety and lyricism and their willingness to let a reader dwell in the pangs of realization that we sometimes try to protect our children from. "

" You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.' "

" I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook. "

" One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone. "

" I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?' "

" I feel most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws even God must obey. "

" I feel that, as a person of color, I've always been interested in the stories that are quiet and the stories that often get overlooked. "