Getting that metal, getting the National Medal of the arts meant, personally for me, it was quite an achievement and one that i felt really humbled to receive. That the arts mattered. And to have the arts recognized at that level of the country of government, it was a profound act. Not just for me, but for every young person in this country who wanted to express themselves, whether with paint, words, song, or bodies and dance. It meant all of those things. I wrote as a hobby and i did not know it could be a profession at all. I had no role models. I had never met a novelist or a poet. All of these people that wrote these things were names in a book. And the only one i really had a visual was long gone. To me, it was something i did as a hobby. I really thought that i was going to be one of the three things, to be a doctor, lawyer, or teacher. I do not feel that pressure that you will become a doctor, lawyer, or teacher. It was just in the air. And i discovered creative writing classes. You mean you can do this as a profession . And thats when i started thinking about the fact that this is what i loved. And what i did whenever i had a free moment. So i made up my mind that i was going to try it. While i was young and could afford to starve. I went home and did the thing that so many kids and their parents tell them. I said i want to be a poet. My father was a chemist. Credit, he said i dont understand poetry. Dont be upset if i dont read your poems. He let me go and do my thing. That was all i wanted. They were really supportive. As a grandmother, i realize how courageous it was for them and how great it was for them to let me do the things that they didnt understand. Ohio, and in akron there were books in my house. Which onesot know were supposed to be difficult or not. Reading a comic book and trying my hand at shakespeare in the afternoon. To me, they were all words on a page that then came to life. And that was magic. It meant i could go anyplace in downorld just by sitting and opening the object. I begin writing as soon as i could learn how to write. Then even though i had been reading childrens books, the idea that i could actually take paper andnd put it to write words to create this other reality, i felt like a magician myself. Did it tonow you publish it, i thought it was because it was enjoyable. Book. Lly i would read a my brother is two years older than i am. I would read every book that he got out of the library. The books were they would meet aliens and there would be all these people and i would sit down and write my own little story except owed put a black girl in it because there were no black girls in the stories. But i could put them in there. I could put a little black girl into a story of my own making. That helped met also understand that i was worth something. The little black girl landing on the moon was not such a fiction. Shy. Very ive always been very shy. It wasa of teaching, just the act of getting in front of a class that filled me with terror, frankly. I had to earn a living to support my habit. I began to apply for creative writing positions and i got my first one. It was lucky. In arizona. A place i had never been. It is not a place i wouldve said i wanted to go, necessarily. But thats where the job was. Yearsed up spending eight in the phoenix area. We had our daughter there. Learned that those terrified to go into class, students were more flayed than i was. And it was the love of writing that carried me over because of his teaching something that i loved. And if i could convey the love, the shyness fell away and we all met on that page. And after arizona, i came to virginia and i have been here ever since. I remember it was in the spring. In may. It was the very end of the semester. In fact, i was in chicago at the time, giving a reading with gwendolyn brooks. I was terrifically excited about this. Being able to read one of my idols. But i also knew that after that reading, i had the entire summer free. I had nothing more to do but to finish reading my students poems and portfolios, putting in the grades, and i was free for the whole summer. My husband said, youre going to get a call in a minute. And im not supposed to tell you what its about. But im going to tell you anyway. He told me i was going to get a to bend they wanted me the next poet laureate of the United States. It came completely out of the blue. When i said yes to becoming poet laureate, i thought that i was going to have to defend poetry. I made up my mind i wasnt going to defend anything. It should be celebrated. Defense implies that something is wrong or that it is under siege. Even before i could implement this celebration, people began to write me letters. It was an incredible. They start these letters off with this disclaimer of, i dont know much about poetry. Or, you know, its a really wonderful thing. I really dont know much. We talk about the poems that moved them. From the middle of the country, he told me his first book in got out of the mobile library. A collection of poems, and he only got it because after filling out his entire all cart,uff he needs for his he did not have time to get any books. At first, i felt cheated. Its by this dude whos dead. And hes at it because it was the only book he had, it had just changed his life. People were basically telling me enlarged and enriched their lives. They told me they did not feel equal, made to feel 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 know that it is their song and their story. That was about 1993. Strongly, this misconception that poetry lived in an ivory tower and you somehow had to be educated. Aat you somehow had to have certain standing to be able to understand it. And it did not deal with everyday life. I can think of nothing higher than everyday life. Realized that so many isolated or apart from poetry because it wasnt itsn the schools hard to grade. Its hard to put a grade on someones interpretation of a poem. Someone iswhen really struck speechless by a poem, they are exactly that. It is very hard to write about it. ,o the difficulty in teaching is why poetry really made something that weve grown up with. Luckyaid earlier, i was that i grew up with books. I was allowed to discover them at my arms speed. So yes, the misconceptions are out there. Arts thehat the notion that the arts, that we dont need them. That they are the low person on the totem pole. That we can get rid of the arts and we will be just fine. Distrusts from a basic of the arts, a basic feeling that somehow, they dont have to do that very spirit. We are born creative. Wildly creative. The joy that comes from being able to express that without having to rationalize it and the thingshink of that will be in precisely the right order. That with thedo paintbrush, kids know what thats like. And im not trying to say that other things arent as important. And i grew up with the sciences. Thishere are two sides of and you cant just say, ok, we dont need the arts and humidity humanity. We need them, desperately. Testimonial. Back when the earth was new and heaven just a whisper, back when the names of things hadnt had time to stick. The world called and i answered. Breath and called that life. Between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet. I was euro at and flourish. How can i count my blessings when i did not know their names. Back when everything was still to come. Luckily doubt everywhere. World,my promise to the and the world followed me here. More now from charlottesville on the origins of james madison, the fourth president of the United States, and the earlier years created a future founding father. The story that was kind of the greatest interpreter, he gave this quote. James madison did the most but is known the least. The thing that is frustrating but fascinating was that he was this incredibly impactful individual. But because he was private and because he was introverted and other aspects. He was 54, 100 pounds, anxiety attacks. Samed not exerted the Gravitational Force field on people that Thomas Jefferson or these other largerthanlife figures had. Very deep tolunged try to figure out how to we know this guy . How do we understand and motivate him . James madison was from right here in Orange County. In the heart of virginia. He grew up in this house right behind us, which has changed over the years. They brought him back to what he was. There andsed over another, much more primitive before hiselopment father built this brick house. Ofison was the son definitely a privileged family. His father was a planter and grew up in the elite gentry. Of brought into the world the experience of being an older brother. He had a very demanding and unconventional father that raised him here and a mother that was very warm. Maybe a little bit anxious as some of the studies i write about in the book. And so he was the eldest son of a premier family in virginia at the time and enjoyed all of the benefits and burdens that came with that. He was sent away to an elite boarding school when he was young and his early teens. He was sent out of the state as kind the eldest born. It later became princeton and an unusual choice. It was not william and mary which is what most parents at the time send their kids. T was not an Anglican College it was a presbyterian one. Father brought him back to be a tutor to his youngest sibling here. He didnt want to do that, but of beingrt of the cost the eldest son, the bearer of all this privilege. That he came back and forced by his father to apply all that learning an investment. Kind of being in the cities of the country. Orange county is where you really understand where he was and how he came to be. What was he going to be and what was he going to do for a living . What he was really good at was legislating. Understanding problems, researching them. Coming up with an approach to really crucial Public Policy problems that everyone else couldnt understand or couldnt figure out how to translate. That is what he was good at. Because he inherited the , also settling on vocation outside of Public Service. He had a terrible time becoming a lawyer. I chronicled the difficulties he had. He had an equally harder time becoming a lawyer which is what he felt like he needed to do. There are these really funny passages where hes complaining boring andhow difficult and intense the study of law is. In ther managed to do it right way. Just miserable in the process, vocally miserable about it. He was a constant struggle of how he was going to make a living. He had a fit of anxious depression when he came back. He had these psychological challenges which i think and i argue in the book, that he had a category of anxiety. A couple of causes kind of took him over. In the the harassment bathrooms they were experiencing in virginia at this time. Kind of like you needed a licensed to preach. Here, they were in prison den harassed by the ruling state religion. Taken. Was very you cast her lot with an underdog. There are some accounts that he traveled out there and took this on as a cause. It is the political itch to use Public Policy to express conviction and a principal. And engage in questions of governance. And he talked about it that way. Member of Orange County to the constitutional convention. This was after the declaration and they needed to come up with a constitution. He became a counselor to the governor. Governor Patrick Henry, he was in the mid20s. When he was in his mid20s. He started his career, his ofviction ran the gamut every Public Policy issue that the country was dealing with. When he was a young age, governor Patrick Henry became absolutely obsessed with the problem of filters and supplies. The state was figuring out how to supply federal part federal, state. It dragged on for ever. How do you acquit meant supply the troops when the dollars you are using, they are five different signs of money. Is difficult to find food and drink. You need people in government trying to work the problem. And he carried that through to the congress. When he came back to virginia as a delegate after having been in congress, he got fascinated by the problem of overhauling virginias state code. And there was Capital Punishment for all kinds of random things. Intond of threw himself much less sexy examples. Separation of powers in the design of our government. The design of the presidency. Appointed, very statesmanlike federal judiciary. Issues forll those what he contributed and there are dozens of others that he also mastered. One of the grains of the book. When i was looking through the , they happened in 1788. This major figure, they faced off with each other for three weeks. They try to tear down the constitution. Epilepsy attacks caused him to be removed. Think he experienced it as incredibly daunting and difficult, this pressure of having the whole country on his shoulders. Time, when he intense public battles, it was not easy for him. Naturally to be a leader in the nation. The gifts that he had, the understanding. He mastered it by will. It was a more tortured overcoming of obstacles for him than it was for someone who was, you know, who had a great sense of ease about being in public. There was a charisma and that, that is not what madisons experience was like at all. Sometimes a crippled him. He was the least likely person to get involved with politics. There was a wonderful friend of houseat ran a boarding and there was one time when Thomas Jefferson said he should come back and run for governor of virginia. She said but he could never handle a torrent of a uses he would expect and public life, he was too sensitive. The fact that his closest friends said politics is the last thing he should do, the fact that he did it anyway because of how deeply he felt the need to address these heblems, even if it was him, said it has to be somebody, i might as well do it. It was his conviction that paradigm through andrew some have given to him because they about,at he was talking if you get out an answer that was probably better than a lot of the rest of them had done. He was throwing himself into the ring to figure out the solution work, the presidency came out of the kind of chain of succession and relationships that he had an effect that he had been secretary, when he shifted into the executive, and he began the president of the United States, the deficiencies that he had were more on display, it was harder for him to give confidence to the nation during the war of 1812 when he was criticized. That was one of the things he saw, even with his step in this is what the cabinet members where he prosecuted the war, the signals and the image that he presented to the contrary did not really meet the moment and that was one of the reasons that his image separate over the decades. He very much mcmullen when the country and to design his foundation and when it needed to thet the compromises and instructions that would make the states to a stronger federal government that would create the home machine that was going to guide the country and that is how he talked about his life, one of the initial is a research was looking at the made event drafts and memoirs that he did as he got older. He kept on refining this very short autobiography. It was like 20 pages. His whole on all of life on the events that happened up until he was 37. He would pay good barely any attention to when he was president or secretary of state and not because he sighs lets work and his contribution to the world as having been writing and enacting the constitution and and theucting the wars, country as chief executive. Theres imaging and 1820s were medicine is in his old age when he appears and has been president , secretary of state and father of the constitution verye takes on some unpopular, difficult causes. Like giving africanamericans the right of representation and the design of a copy for population of districts. People quieting and hushing and try around as they get what he says, it is totally different than Daniel Webster standing up for people and being bought away by this powerful oratory. But it was that quietness and the element of being magnetically pulled toward the depth of what he was saying, thatconviction, the fact he knew what he was talking about the state explains why people were so drawn to him. I dont think that history has given the right credit to james madison, i wrote the book basically about statesmanship. You see it in the way talks about the federal judiciary. Easy about how he talks about the United States senate and when he talks of regular citizens. There was supposed to be challenging of public opinion. There is a must be research and knowledge. There was a bust to be alliances and compromises and debate and liberation, all of which go toward pushing to a higher plane and not just going to lows, denominator and not just into what makes people feel that. We would not be here but for his statesmanship at any number of crucial junctures that we had come when it was freedom of religion or getting constitutions asked. , we needed somebody doing what he did in the fact that we dont think about it much, i think that is the problem. , next more from sharpsville with advice from president ial historians about the potential and the pitfalls of the president s first year. The millicent is a nonpartisan Academic Group associated with university of virginia. It focuses on president ial scholarships, policy and also president ial history. Whence we have to get that text editor that committee and we have to get the civil rights bill and get started in the senate. Lyndon johnson really capture the very well. The promise of the first year which is you are elected and you have a mandate working with the congress, you, the president , the executive branch, as the new johnson said when he became president , novak no matter how big your majorities, you get one year before congress stops thinking about you, the president and start thinking about themselves, their own reelection and at about january of your second year after you have done your first year, all the members of congress are thinking about the Midterm Election and they are really cautious without taking any risk to help you get your mandate and your agenda through. That is my president who are only on their administration are so eager to get things done. They feel this is the moment theyll never have again. There are also learning the ropes, theyre still not as experienced as they will be in for five years so sometimes they make stakes. , theis what at first year first