I'm perfectly happy when I look out at an audience and it's all women. I always think it's kind of odd, but then, more women than men, I think, read and write poetry.

I'm passing on a tradition of which I am part. There's a long line of poets who went before me, and I'm another one, and I'm hoping to pass that on to other younger, or newer, poets than myself.

But I am not political in the current events sense, and I have never wanted anyone to read my poetry that way.

We are authors, all of us, concerned with beginning, with making, with sources and substance.

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

American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.