When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.

I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected.

Quite a while ago, I made a conscious choice to place my teaching first, so it was very ego-invested. That decision wasn't a good thing in some ways.

I don't like crows. In the poem "C," crows are predatory, killing other birds and so forth. But in my morning walks, there were always crows, particularly at certain times of the year. And they're very aggressive, very visible and loud. They're not at all likable, but they have to be dealt with. They are part of the picture, the art in the morning. You cannot deny their reality.

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

Now that I'm more middle class, I have access to consumer goods. I do enjoy feminine frippery, feminine doo-da, stuff like that.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.