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.

The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

As a female in a home with a whole bunch of brothers and being very close to my father, without a mother and later having a hostile relationship with my stepmother, there were all kinds of Freudian issues rising from possessing a female body that I had to negotiate with no guidance, and I did this negotiation almost instinctually.

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.

I only submit the poems I think are the strongest.

It's as if I'm setting aside the husband and son, you know, the patriarchal world, for the world of the muse. This is the world of writing.

"I want to be always happy," Maxine Hong Kingston announces . But, as this interview makes clear, for me, it was the desire to write poetry that kept me discontented, if not depressed and unhappy, through what many casual biographers have characterized as successful and productive decades.