Sometimes, in my published complaints about not being a writer, I have recalled the prospect - the yearning to be a writer - as it first formed for me.

People called me a tomboy. That was the term used then. I was very much someone who was comfortable in male clothing, and even later when I grew up, I was constantly wearing dungarees, wearing guy shirts.

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

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.

Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero.

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.

Crows appear in many of my new unpublished poems. In these walks, they take on a symbolic life apart from their irritating, undeniable, interruptive presence. I figure them differently.