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.

Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France).

I think about the kinds of gardens that Queen Elizabeth put up. She made gardens in the shape of an "E," for Elizabeth, just one more way in which she used symbolism to solidify her reign: appearing as the Virgin Queen, for example, or wearing a dress embroidered with eyes and ears to indicate that she knew all that was going on in her castle; she had spies.

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.

Each of us is present, but partially.

A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.

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.