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.

Is there a term that one might use rather than say that one is homosexual? Is there a different physical gender and symbolic dimension? I'm thinking of Adrienne Rich's notion of the lesbian spectrum. It's not as if sexual identity is binary: one must be either homo or hetero.

When I was younger, yes, there was a part of me - and I wrote about that bit in Among the White Moon Faces - that wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be accepted by my brothers and to be their peers.

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

I feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

Rather, the collapsing between act and condition, "I am" with "I do," feels like authenticity, an authenticity of being. The muse rewarded me for a few months, after April of 2012, by giving me poems, almost a poem each day, that I can claim as coming from my writer's status.

When I write, I put aside the heterosexual world to admit a muse that is a woman-loving-woman female.