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.

I have a muse who's very powerful, but I'm still a hopeless deadbeat of a poet.

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

According to [Maxine Hong] Kingston, the prose writer is "a workhorse."

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

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.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.