The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.

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

Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.