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.

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.

For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.

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

Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes.

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.