Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

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.

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.