When I spoke at the 2012 Contemporary Women Writers' Conference in Taipei, I thought it offered an appropriate moment and site to announce my new manifesto10 and profession - to be a writer.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

Poetics is a science for stammering poets.

The Chinese traditionally have revered age and longevity - I have one and hope for the other! - so, in Taipei, a city-hub for global Chinese who dis-identify with the People's Republic of China's construction of a Communist nationalist Chineseness, I called on the Chinese muse of writing to witness my emergence out of the academic woods.

The body in defense against male appropriation expresses itself through work in writing, and the work in writing produces the book. So it's a different form of creation and generation that may be viewed as creation without male contribution as a component or challenge.

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.

Free verse is chained in sentence-to-sentence links and breaks free in line breaks.