I was nine when I first knew I wanted to be a writer, in particular, a poet.

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.

"Time" does not mean "occasion."

I came to realize this weird projection: you are much more passionate about hating something outside of you when you know that something is also in you.

From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.

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