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

In that way, I don't understand myself. It might have to do with my own conflicts, where to place my body as a child, which I have carried over to now. In this way I'm constantly dislocated.

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.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.

From the world of the muse and writing, there will come, hopefully, the book. You're right, for me, that the muse is always female, and the book comes from a separate gender dimension than the concrete male world that, as you pointed out, has been surrounding me since I was an infant.

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.