I didn't know any poets growing up in Kansas.

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.

Harper Lee's novel 'To Kill a Mockingbird' became iconic almost immediately after appearing in 1960: best-seller status; the Pulitzer Prize the next year; a classic movie soon after, with Gregory Peck in an Academy Award-winning role.

We quickly erase hoaxes once exposed, excising the monstrous palimpsest, because as with any witch hunt or obvious fake, afterward we can't quite explain why we ever believed the outrageous thing in the first place.

It's a remarkable pace of which things change and adapt, and it's hard for us to keep up with as a species.

I always keep thinking, 'The next role - that's going to be the one that's really going to define me and show them all. I'll transform and disappear, and it will be a revelation.'

For an entire populace, change, growth, and spontaneity were dangerous. Acting upon a personal desire, whispering a hidden longing, revealing your true feelings - all the human actions we think of as essential to a character - had be censored by the self lest they be punished by the state.

We are already witnessing a transformation in the U.S. economy to increased production of lower carbon energy through fuel switching to natural gas and expansion of wind, solar, geothermal, and other renewable non-carbon intensive energy sources.