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A. There is a sense of the old great colonial powers being colonized by the satellite populations from the south. It also has something to do with a more anthropological vision of the universe rather than a strictly European philosophical framework. It is an ease with nature, a sense of cycles, of roots, of the earth, of things that have been thought of as being traditionally feminine. There's an element of fever and heat and intensity, emotions and contradictions, a deliberate rejection of decorum.
Q. You are a feminist. Do you consider your books feminist works?
A. Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.
I believe a great feminist achievement is to experiment with the language. It was my revolutionary intention in Palm Latitudes to rearrange the language, to tropicalize and feminize it. My second goal was to create a world in which there were only women, and only non-Anglo women, and to give these women a mythology, to have the city understood through them.
I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.
I'm influenced by something that I heard said about Israel, about how you would know that there was a Jewish state when you arrived and your luggage was picked up by Jewish bag handlers and there were Jewish prostitutes in the streets. I'm trying to come up with a world of women inhabited by women.
Q. Didn't feminists criticize your book for a scene where one woman kills another?
A. Yes, but it's vitally important that women have the authority to murder as well as to create on the page. There's a real danger in women being relegated to only nurturing roles. Women must be able to give death as well as birth, to have the full alphabet of human possibility when they write.
Q. What does living the literary life mean for you?
A. I write. I rewrite. I lecture. I teach. I review. I edit. I perform. I don't watch television. I don't read a newspaper. I don't read magazines. I have few conventional pastimes. I have to protect myself from the toxicity of this culture. I read poetry out loud every day. I read my work out loud. I meditate.
It appears that writing is a sedentary form, but in fact it requires incredible physical, emotional and spiritual stamina. When I finish writing at the end of a serious day of work, I feel like I've been mountain climbing. I remember A. Alvarez said about Sylvia Plath, "Poetry of this order is a murderous art."
I was in Bulgaria recently, and I was being shown so many statues of executed poets that I finally said, "You know, in Communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves."
Q. In a world where poetry is considered nonessential to even many cultured persons, what do you see as its role? Does the world need more poets?