I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.