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There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

I was unnerved to learn in my twenties that the poems of Emily Dickinson that I had memorized as a girl were not the poems as she had written them.

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.

Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry.

I don't try to call myself a poet. But I know that my stuff is pretty literal, in that the themes are pretty simple and on the surface.

The public is probably more suspicious of poets than women, and maybe for good reason.

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity.

I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind.