My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

To me, the mind seems to be spread out in the whole body - the senses are part of the brain. I guess they're not where the thinking is done.

This creature of the poem may assemble itself into a being with its own centrifugal force.

Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think. Out of memory - a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors.

I have learned to get pleasure from speaking of pain

I have never thought I could take it, not even for the children. It is all I have wanted to do, to stand between them and and pain. But I come from a long line of women who put themselves first.

Maybe in order to understand sex fully/one has to risk being destroyed by it.