Looking back, fire images have been constant in my poetry. As a boy, it was my job to light the fire each morning, and I remember the celebratory bonfires at the end of the war. It was from staring into fire that I began my first poetry.

I need to look back on my poetic ventures, make sense of them as a whole, and move forward... and to experiment without external demands.

It is always better to write for the whole of society than for the poetry-reading public.

I've always had the wish, the need, and the obsession to become a public poet.

It is critical to develop a biofuel industry powered by feedstocks produced in every corner of the country, in addition to the Midwest. That is why USDA has established five regional research centers working on science necessary to ensure profitable biofuels can be produced from a diverse range of feedstocks.

We virtually never feel our age, but thinking that we should can lead to disaster.

I come away from a gig thinking, 'Yeah, I'm worth something.' I can still do it and entertain people, and that's worth it.

With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.