Heterosexuality - whichever gender you are - says that the other gender is very important to you.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

As the only girl growing up for a long time with only boys, as you pointed out, it seems like I was always surrounded by guys. There was this sense in which my female body was a problem.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

I did not write about that kind of insecurity and anxiety between myself and my brothers, because my father was the dominant male figure as I was growing up in that home.

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.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.