The things that I dislike passionately, I have come to realize, are also part of me.

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.

In some ways it is absurd for me to assert, counter to evidence, that I have not been writing.

I was walking every morning, and I'd take my iPod and paper and pen. As I walked, I wrote a poem, and then I'd come home - and sometimes it's legible, sometimes not - I typed the poem up. So I have a new, yet to be published, collection of poems now. It's called Walker's Alphabet, and among other things, it is about walking. My most recent collection of poems in 2010, incidentally, was titled WALKING backwards.

Once you stop talking about the female body empowering itself vis-à-vis male forays or invasions or male demands or the necessity to respond to husband and son to bring the issue down to a more concrete level, the body is a different manifestation physically.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

In the same way, the people whom I most abhor, I abhor them for elements that I abhor in myself.