I could say that in the essay, as it has developed historically, success is determined by the writer's ability to express, through an individual voice, a collective experience - you are speaking individually but you are representing collectively.

All ideas about identity, of course, fit perfectly into the social media wonderland we live in. They seem to really connect. There's a science-fiction aspect to our contemporary life. What's virtual, what's real.

Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.

Technology is transforming everything. Who knows what it's doing, we don't really understand it.

I would say that when I write prose I'm a more socially responsible person. I'm much more a citizen of the world. But the instability of the poetry, the emotional jaggedness, is also me.

When you're an immigrant, you're at the bottom of the ladder. You might not be at the bottom of the ladder economically. Those contradictions led me to feel that the role in society I was given didn't jive with my sense of myself. I think, in fact, that is the case with most people. Everybody feels themselves to be in an original relationship to creation, and feels confined by their social role.

I see myself only sporadically as a teacher and consistently as a writer. Teaching is how I pay the bills...and fortunately, for my students, I can intellectualize about writing, and I can talk about it well, and I like to talk about it.