My recent retirement from full-time teaching to the status of research professor at University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) encouraged me to come out, so to speak.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

There are many things which can not be expressed by words. There are many words which can not be spelled by human tongue. There are many tongues which utter one single truth.

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

Capitalism tries for a delicate balance: It attempts to work things out so that everyone gets just enough stuff to keep them from getting violent and trying to take other people’s stuff.

Life is Beautiful, it is you who want to Enjoy or Cry.Enjoy = Win, Cry = Loose.

Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.

I can promise to be sincere, but I cannot promise to be impartial.

Once I start reading something, I can't stop. I obsessively read, which is a problem with long books!

My parents found what I was interested in and encouraged me. They didn't put me in front of a television and buy lots of toys, the way some American parents do.

Love exists in powder. Love exists in pills. We are all addicts.

Oh, yeah, insanity ran deep in the roots of that family tree.’ (Talon)