Note, the reply will not be "I write," an act that I have, after all, been performing since I was nine.

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

I also wanted to be like my brothers, physically, and yet not physically. So I would constantly - and I think nowadays it's taken for granted that this is what girlfriends do - I would constantly wear their shorts, put on their shirts. That did not seem odd because we were desperately poor for quite a while. It wasn't as if pretty little girlie things were available to me.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.

I'm not sure why my muse is female, except when I am deliberately playing against that figure.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.