I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

My muse is very often, in my mind, a nagger. She nags me.

In various memoir pieces, I have traced the trajectory of yearning through decisions made, good and bad, that had somehow kept the ambition on track.

Even after the mothering dropped because my son grew up, the writing - the muse - was always the third wheel, the lowest on the priority list.

The judges who awarded the 1980 Commonwealth Poetry Prize to my first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula and Other Poems, cited with approval and with no apparent conscious irony my early poem, "No Alarms." The poem was composed probably sometime in 1974 or 1975, and it complained about the impossibility of writing poetry - of being a poet - under the conditions in which I was living then.

The one difference I have noted is that it's made me more tender to my students and to young people particularly. It's made me mellower. I began to have a different perspective, because I may not be around much longer to be hassled by life's pressures.

No matter how sheltered [my students] are, no matter how their parents try to do right by them, every single one of them, you know, every single one of us, that's what we all face. And so it's made me - that's the one change I've marked in myself - it's made me change in the way I relate to my students. I've become a different teacher in that way.