The poem is not a physical body. It's a textual body that has life only insofar as it can act symbolically. It cannot physically act.

The consciousness of one's physical self had to be repressed because, socially, the female body was so visible, an ongoing provocation and incitement of specular curiosity and fascination.

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.

I do want to do the entire alphabet. There's in [Walker's Alphabet] a poem called "A Life" in that grouping. I was going to change that title to "A."

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

I really felt neurotic - it was a neurotic reason - but I had to teach very, very well. That sucked up a lot of oxygen from my time and my creative thinking.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.