Just because suddenly you have a sabbatical doesn't mean that the writing occasion comes to you.

After Fifty Shades of Grey, I think my writing is pretty tame, isn't it?

The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.

This distraction is what one wants, which is very, very bad for the muse, because the muse hates not being in the line of sight. It's no longer an external conflict, like, oh, I have all these demands and I don't like them. The split is in the self. This may explain why, when I was in Santa Barbara before I went to Singapore and then now to Hong Kong, there was a writing moment when I was writing a poem a day. I had never done that before.

I was driven, as have been many writers, both by a repulsion of the childhood home's narrow confines and a desire to reach further, to keep desiring more of a future not yet imagined and not yet written down.

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