It’s been amazing to be able to spend so much time with her. I’ve joined a couple of tours last year and I’m going to visit her in Denver soon. And that sense of trust we were talking about, I mean, she really pushes me to do anything I want to do. She’s really helping to instill a new kind of confidence in me, whether that’s collaborating with a certain musician or visual artist, or indulging in a different style of improvisation…

My wife, my children, my friends, myself. I’m my own strongest critic. I am much tougher on myself than anybody I know, consistently.

I also think that most of us get wisdom from a wide range of sources, from the people we know and love, from strangers on the street, from therapists and counselors, from teachers, from books, from podcasts, so I turn in all of those directions.

People refer to the ‘LMB culture’ as the thing, one of the things, that makes it special. It’s an attention to people who are willing to tackle very big problems. I mean problems that are so big that you couldn’t just solve it in a grant. The kind of problem that you could devote your life to. I was very fortunate in having mentors of Fred Sanger and César Milstein who exercised a kind of very benign mentorship but encouraged us to think big.

The music of the “I Have a Dream” speech is a replication of the music which comes out of the mouths of the African American preacher. Preacher, singer, blues singer, jazz singer, rap person, it is so catching, so hypnotic, so wonderful that, as a poet, I continue to try to catch it, to catch the music.

He was one of those persons, certainly, but my sister, my grandmother and uncle who raised me, who taught me, by their actions, that it was good to be good, that it was nice to be nice, influenced me more than any other persons have since that time.