My poems are almost all written as Diane. I don't have any problems with that, and if other women choose to identify with this, I think that's terrific.

The best young writers are convinced they need blurbs from famous writers before an editor will even read the first page of a manuscript. If this is true, then the editorial system that prevails today stinks. And let's start reforming it.

One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves.

Because, in fact, women, feminists, do read my poetry, and they read it often with the power of their political interpretation. I don't care; that's what poetry is supposed to do.

I write in the first person because I have always wanted to make my life more interesting than it was.

Poems come from incomplete knowledge.

I am not political as a person.