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

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" For many years, I thought a poem was a whisper overheard, not an aria heard. "

" You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you, but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before, it's impossible. "

" I thought, after the Pulitzer, at least nothing will surprise me quite that much in my life. And another one happened. It was quite amazing. "

" What writing does is to reveal. "

" There are distinct duties of a poet laureate. I plan a reading series at the Library of Congress and advise the librarian. The rest is how I want to promote poetry. "

" I always loved science. And in fact, I got a science award in high school. I mean, I loved science, but I think I loved literature more. "

" I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem. "

" All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself. "

" Being true to yourself really means being true to all the complexities of the human spirit. "

" 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. "

" The sound of the mandolin is a very curious sound because it's cheerful and melancholy at the same time, and I think it comes from that shadow string, the double strings. "

" I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels. "

Black And White

" Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. "

" I prefer to explore the most intimate moments, the smaller, crystallized details we all hinge our lives on. "

" I see a resurgence of interest in poetry. I am less optimistic about the prospects for the arts when it comes to federal funding. "

" Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture. "

" The poetry that sustains me is when I feel that, for a minute, the clouds have parted and I've seen ecstasy or something. "

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

" One definition of eternity is that we are not alone on this planet, that there are those who've gone before and those who will come, and that there is a community of spirits. "

" I make a discovery in a poem as I write it. "

" I try to show what it is about language and music that enthralls, because I think those are the two elements of poetry. "

" I believe people may have a predisposition for artistic creativity. It doesn't mean they're going to make it. "

" Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature. "

" As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important. "

" I carry a notebook with me everywhere. But that's only the first step. "

" 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 write short stories, and I wrote a play. "

" I loved to read, but I always thought that the dream was too far away. The person who had written the book was a god, it wasn't a person. "

" I've always been intrigued by the way history works, the way we decide what is mentioned. "

" In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things. "