My brothers were my peers, but they were not the preeminent male figures in my emotional life.

I don't know where to place my body. Everyone notices that about me. I'm very restless.

This distraction is what one wants, which is very, very bad for the muse, because the muse hates not being in the line of sight. It's no longer an external conflict, like, oh, I have all these demands and I don't like them. The split is in the self. This may explain why, when I was in Santa Barbara before I went to Singapore and then now to Hong Kong, there was a writing moment when I was writing a poem a day. I had never done that before.

In the poem "C," the crows are associated with cancer, because I had suffered a cancer scare.

John Milton famously claimed, "Fame is the spur" for the poet, and indeed when we consider the six years he spent writing Paradise Lost, and the additional years revising it, from 1664 to 1674, we may allow that spur.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

It is true that my characters have sex.