When someone asks me now, "What do you do?" I will be able to say, "I am a writer."

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

The crows live in the world like you do. They are part of nature.

Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.