I wrote things for the school's newspaper and - like all teenagers - I dabbled in poetry.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals but even as I withdrew into this reading I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

In my late teenage years I developed a real passion for it and wrote a lot of poetry.

I was one of those dark quiet kids that wrote poetry.

I always wrote poetry and stuff like that so putting songs together wasn't that spectacular.

You know bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet and you know there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.

I was a 16-year-old girl at one point so of course I wrote poetry.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call but I wrote letters I wrote short stories I wrote books.

Peace Train is a song I wrote the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions of human beings.