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.

Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

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.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

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 only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

Particularly in relationship to my father - there's something that daughters, girl children, do almost instinctually in their relationships with their father, so that physically, those boundaries must be respected and never crossed.