One arrives at a recognition that one needs to be distracted.

There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

I'm always resisting [my muse]. I'm resisting her power.

In actual fact, I have been an academic - a college and university teacher and scholar - for much of the last 45 years, and only rarely a writer.

I was writing poems as I was walking. I was able to take that restlessness, that nomadic distraction, and use that distraction in the world and turn that distraction into observations and then into poems.

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