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.

I guess my writing through time has focused on a number of dimensions that reflect separately on the meaning and social place of the female body.

I think that's what, to me, also talks about the silences in my work - as a woman, a woman writer, when you say, "no" or you have to say, "no" so often to the writing occasion, those occasions don't really come back.

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 things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.

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.

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.