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 up on the East Coast I miss that weather all the time. You'd think I'd get used to not having it, but I don't.

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

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."

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 reading.

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'm really interested in what you remember, how you remember, what your perspective is as opposed to somebody else's.