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.

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.

Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, "I am" with "I do," feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status.

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.

The inimitable writer Maxine Hong Kingston published a book in 2002 with the title To Be the Poet. However, in contrast to the transformatory distinctions Kingston makes between the conditions of being a prose writer and "the poet," my multigenre impulses incline me to a broader transformation: to be a writer.