Singing has nothing to do with poetry, except as twins separated at birth.

In Sister Swing, the two sisters have boyfriends and they go to bed with them, but the descriptions are not graphic. They're minimal. The sex is not graphic in the way that DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover has all these graphic passages.

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

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.

I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was going to change that title to "A."