Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

Signs of a maddening system of writing and counting that calibrates the values of something the poet does not yet know. Praxis is therefore poetics.

Poetry has roots, and sometimes they are aerial. Sometimes they are buried.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

One should be able to teach adequately and feel good about it.

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.

For a while they wore suits or pants suits, and pants suits are kind of a women's appropriation of male costume, work costume. For me, it wasn't Western feminism or the Western workspace. It was my growing up in a house with a bunch of boys, so that male costuming just became my mode of appropriation way before, you know, Betty Friedan came along.