[Cancer] didn't make me more intense about not working more and just having fun more. It didn't do that either. 

Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

In publishing books and winning awards, it's like you've enjoyed this meal, you know, two months ago. How long can you be nourished by thinking about it? You've already ingested it, and you've excreted it, and that was two months ago. You had this fabulous meal. It's not going to keep you satiated today. You have to go out and get your next meal. For me, that's writing. I have to go out and hunt my next meal.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

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'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected.

"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.