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.

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

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.

Some Asian American male scholars have claimed this muse to be Guong Goong, God of Literature, and, simultaneously, although not coincidentally or triflingly, God of War, but I did not have such a gendered muse in mind then.

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.

The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.