I'm much more comfortable in pants and shirts, running around. There was a typical construction about womanhood when I was growing up that I rejected.

You've read some of the poems in this new unpublished book [Walker's Alphabet], e.g., the poem "C." I have a number of poems whose titles are letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F.

Wouldn't that be wonderful if I could do that? And that way, I could walk with the muse, rather than walk without her. The novel would write itself.

In recent poems, I have abandoned the theme of not being able to write for an even more obsessive subject, the nature of language, particularly English, in the formation of my imagination and being.

The poem might come to you as you're preparing to teach a lecture, right? And when you say, "no" to that occasion, that poem is gone.

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

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