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.

[Irony] has everything to do with what Tillie Olsen so powerfully imagined in her short story, "As I Stand Here Ironing" and elaborates on polemically in her 1978 book, Silences, in a chapter first delivered as a talk in 1967. As Olsen clearly saw it for women, my not being a writer was a material consequence of my being a woman - a wife, mother, housewife, and a certain kind of feminist teacher - attentive, one-on-one, face-to-face, nurturing, the kind who receives high ESCI evaluation scores from undergraduates and graduate students.

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

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems.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.

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.