I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was going to change that title to "A."

When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.

[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?