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

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

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.

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.

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 a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.