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 the things that you claim or that you try for are already based on the limits of language.

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 the things that you claim or that you try for are already based on the limits of language.

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 in or whose century you happen to be in.

For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.

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 think part of it is my training, and just my visual sense of things.

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 of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."

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