“For myself, writing has always been the way of finding what I was feeling about, what so engaged me as ‘subject,’ and particularly to find the articulation of emotions in the actual writing. So, I don’t choose my subjects with any consciousness whatsoever. I think once things have begun—that is, once there are three or four lines, then there begins to be a continuity of possibility engendered which I probably do follow. And I can recognize, say, looking back at what I have written, that some concerns have been persistent: the terms of marriage, relations of men and women, senses of isolation, senses of place in the intimate measure. But I have never to my own knowledge begun with any sense of ‘subject.’”
