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.

I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

I look at my young students, and I no longer have the sense that, oh, I'm the authority and they have to meet a certain standard. It's like, oh, look at these young ones. They've got such a hard road in front of them. I don't envy them having life ahead of them.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

When people say "the body," frequently they mean the literal body, the physical body.