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

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.

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

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

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.

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.