There are a couple of poems I've written with masculine muses, very often the muse to me is a female.

"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.

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 feel compassionate, because I know [students] all have to go down this road of suffering and it's going to be tough.

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.

It's why muse is so impatient with me. I don't ever go to her until after the teaching or whatever is over.

Of course, among the confused motives that spurred me toward being a writer was also the desire to look, to be above the trees and rooftops, beyond the Malaysian horizon that circumscribed my life.