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.

I was always a reader. In the fifth grade, I got some sort of prize for having read hundreds of books from the library.

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.

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.

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.

These new theories of the universe, that there are multiple universes just bubbling up constantly - it's all pretty wild.