The days start to be charged not because tomorrow you're leaving, but because in three weeks you're leaving. The future impinges. So you start to think about the frame.

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 failure.

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 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.

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

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.

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 where I live now.