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.

Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat.

I'm nomadic. Even when I'm a visiting professor here at the City University of Hong Kong, in this campus flat, I'm constantly getting up, sitting down, picking this or that up. You can't do that and be a writer. You need to be able to sit still.

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

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

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.

My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.