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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.