I had a couple of Asian readers and other folks tell me, "Oh, you have a lot of sex in your writing."

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

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.

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 don't really get into the power sufficiently, and that's also a problem for me.

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.

These commonplace categories - wife, mother, housewife, teacher - are in fact teleological referents. They gesture to profound states of being that animate, absorb and saturate the subject, like indelible dyes spilled repeatedly over a plain fabric. No matter if the fabric is sturdy or delicate, translucent or opaque, those dyes will stain. They will color the days and years and life.