This cultivated popular interest in the arts. [applause] getting that National Medal of the arts and personally it was quite an achievement were humbled to receive but it also meant that the arts mattered and to have been recognized at that level at the country of government it was a profound act not just for me but for every young person in this country, whoever wanted to express themselves whether with paint or words or songs or with their bodies and dance. So i commend all of those things. I wrote as a hobby. Ive never met a novelist or a poet. All these people wrote these things with names in a book and the only one i had a visual of what shakespeare and he was long gone. So to me it was something i did as a hobby. I thought i was going to be either will come of the three things i dont think my parents at her pressure to be poor feel the pressure you will become a doctor or lawyer or teacher of it was just in the air and then i discovered creative writing class. That means you can actually do it as a profession . And thats when i started thinking about the fact this is what i loved him. Whenever i had a free moment so i made up my mind that i was going to try it. While i was young i was going to try this. I went home and did the thing so many parents do and i said i want to be a poet. My father was a chemist and to his credit he said i dont understand poetry, dont be upset if i dont read your poe poems. He basically let me go and do my thing which is all i wanted so they were really supportive. Now as a mother and grandmother i realize how courageous and brave it was for them to let me do this thing they didnt understand. I was born in akron ohio and there were books in my house thing goodness but i didnt know which ones were supposed to be difficult or not, so my parents let me browse. I remember reading a comic book in the morning and bee then tryg my hand at shakespeare in the afternoon. To me they were all words on a page but then came to life and that was magic because it meant i could go anyplace in the world just by sitting down and opening up this object. I began writing as soon as i learned how to write. I thought though ive been reading childrens books and things like that that i could actually take a pencil and put it to paper and write words and create this story, this other reality. But i did it because it was enjoyable. I was asked about the end when i was writing in earnest and basically what would happen i would read the book, my brother was three years older than i did loved Science Fiction so i would read every book he got out of the library. I would these pics were to reveal these people and then i would sit down and i would write my own little story except i would put a black girl in there because there were no black girls in these stories but i could put them into a story of my own making. And i think that that helped me also understand that i was worth something. Thats a little black girl landing on the moon wasnt such a fiction if i could put it down on paper and have it come alive. I was very shy. Ive always been very shy so the idea of teaching something was just the act of a and i had to earn a living to support my habit to. We ended up spending eight years in phoenix and tempe area, beautiful years and i learned though i was terrified to go to the class, students were more afraid than i was and that was the love of writing but carried me over because i was teaching something that i loved. Then it fell away and we all kind of net on the page. After i came to the university of virginia and i remember that it was in the spring in may and it was the very end of the semester. I was in chicago at the time giving a reading with Gwendolyn Brooks being able to read. I also knew after the reading i had the entire summer free. I have nothing to do but finish reading and i was free for the whole summer. I got a phone call and i was packing to go home and go got ae call from my husband who said youre going to get a call in a minute. Im going to be the next poet laureate. When i said yes i wasnt going to defend anything. There was nothing to be defended. It should be celebrated. It applies that something is wrong. But its under siege. But even before i could implement this celebration, people began to write me lette letters. I dont know much about poetry. I dont know much but then would come the convention they would talk about the first column or the fact i remember one man from the middle of the country who told me the first book he got out of the library in his hometown was a collection of poems and he got it after filling out his entire. But he grabbed the first book he saw and it happened to be that. First i have to pull a book of poems. Then he said because of the only book he had he started reading it and it changed his life. It enriched their lives int andt the same time they were telling me that they did not feel equal somewhere along their lives that they were not worthy of this, and i thought that is my mission. Weve got to get poetry everywhere as much as you can so people can feel comfortable with it and no that it is their song and story. Maybe you have to have a certain understanding in that it did not deal with everyday life. It was somehow about higher things. I can think of nothing besides higher life, frankly. And i realized that so many people felt isolated or set apart from poetry because it wasnt taught in schools at a very young age and one of the things i think it is an taught in schools as it is hard to grade, its hard to put a grade on someones interpretation of thepoem. The difficulty is in teaching and one of the reasons it is something weve grown up with. And as i said, i was lucky that i grew up with books. They were around me. I was about to discover them at my own speed and we realized most people or many people dont have that luxury so there is a misconception. I think the notion that the arts are dispensable and we dont need them and they are the low prism on the totem pole and Everything Else we can get rid of the arts and it will be justified, that comes from i think a basic distrust of the arts or a feeling that somehow they dont have to do with our spirit. Its just a natural thing for the human being to want to express themselves. We are born creative, wildly creative if we look at every child they are wildly creative. The joy that comes from being able to express that without having to rationalize it or think of all of the words that are going to say in their late order how i feel when i cannot even describe it myself, to be able to do that with one swipe of a paintbrush, kids know what that is like and then we kind of get trained out of it. And im not trying to say that other things are not as important obviously to have the sciences and i grew up with a scientist but there are two sides to this and you cant just say okay we dont need the arts and humanities, we need them desperately. Testimonial. Back when the earth was new and heaven was just a whisper, back when the names of things havent had time to stick, back when the smallest breeze melted summer and autumn, when all the poplars quivered sweetly and rankandfile, the world called and i answered. Each glans ignited. I caught my breath and swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet how could i count my blessings when i didnt know their names . Back when everything was still to come, walk it out everywhere. I gave my promise to the world and the world followed me here