"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's made me mellower. I began to have a different perspective, because I may not be around much longer to be hassled by life's pressures.

One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.