I like to think of the position of Maryland's Poet Laureate as being about language and ideas and how poetry addresses our shared human desire for what is both meaningful and beautiful. Poetry can provide windows to help broaden our perspectives and mirrors to help us reflect on our experiences. It can serve to bring increased meaning, beauty and civility into the public discourse.

Poetry can also help us make sense of the challenges we face in this increasingly interdependent world, contribute to our availability to understand complex relationships and accept necessary ambiguity so that we might be wiser, more compassionate and more productive citizens.

Poetry can affirm and encourage us in our efforts to live significant lives. It can, as Benjamin Demott has written, "help us explore our human connections as well as our distinct human otherness."

Poetry serves us by giving genuine voice to our experiences--our fears and anxieties as well as our hopes and dreams, our spirits and our hearts.

I would like the position of Poet Laureate to help encourage the vision, imagination and artistic expression necessary for us to embrace constructively and energetically the necessary work of the 21st century, and I hope to serve both poetry and the citizens of Maryland as we move more fully into those challenges and opportunities.

I look forward to working with a wide variety of organizations and individuals around the state, exploring together the many possibilities of poetry for our lives.