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

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.

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.

I think that when you reveal things that are going to cause pain, you have rhetorical resources in poetry.

Society imposes an identity on you because of the way you look. Your struggle as a self has to do with an identity being imposed on you that you know is not your identity.

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.

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.