I want, I want, I want! We never grow out of it somehow. Unless we become Buddhists, maybe.

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.

I always wanted to be pretty as a girl, although I believed it was not possible.

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.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to husband and son to bring the issue down to a more concrete level, the body is a different manifestation physically.

I was not - even the notion of "could not" seems to suggest a moment of recognition, but it was such a repressed dimension - I was not able to NOT wear a shirt like my brothers could. My brothers would, in the heat, run around shirtless, and I wouldn't do that, obviously.