I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.

When you're a female poet, would you, therefore, invoke a male muse? When nuns get consecrated into their vocations, they become brides of Christ. Christ is the bridegroom. In these symbolic actions, rather than in physical actions, where a male reaches sexuality or participates in intimate exchanges, if one uses a different term - there's often a heterosexual figuring that takes place. The male poet invokes a beautiful female muse. The virginal nun consecrated invokes the male bridegroom, Christ.

I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.

When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.

It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing.

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.