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.

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.

We live in a trans period. Contemporary issues of sexuality, for example - the exciting aspects of them - have to do with transgenderedness. And there's trans-nationality. There are people like me, for example. I mean, what am I? Am I Indian? Am I American? And I'm not alone in being between things.

We all think of ourselves as our subjectivity, our consciousness.

Historically, there are hierarchies of purity. Certain aspects of poetry are very, very pure. The lyric poem can't be anything but the lyric poem.

You probably have to split yourself in various ways just in order to survive, and to think of yourself as a multitude.

The sun does what it does because the earth tilts.