Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil..

I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly..

One of the things I've always thought is that if I were to write a poetics, it would have to do with the poetics of failure, and the way in which all….

I can't remember the past, or I can't see very clearly, or I've gotten older and the person I was isn't there anymore, and the place I grew up isn't ….

Often poets fall into groups that exclude others, and don't pay attention to those who write in different ways. It seems so limited to me..

I want literature to open all the doors that I can't open by myself, and to allow me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise see..

I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of ….

I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite fai….

A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work..

You can get a sense of the wonderful power of framing by holding your fingers up in a kind of square, walking around the room and framing it differen….

Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching ….

Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France)..

Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period ….

I'm in California, so I know people who are natives who tell me there's lots of weather here, but it's not the same as being in Vermont. Since I grew….

Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes..

I can't move my body slowly. I can't move the line slowly. So I end up with way too much, often opaque to me later..

I'm always somehow drawn to that sense of how fragile things are and how a garden means so differently depending upon whose language you happen to be….

I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems..

Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write..

I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested in imagery. I t….

Language is as fragile as the little alpine plant..