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."

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

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.