One of the reasons I like immersing myself in different texts, putting myself in the company of other writers, is that they do change your vocabulary. They change what you write about or they change the length of lines.

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.

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.

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

Language is as fragile as the little alpine plant.

I try to attach myself to things around me so that they don't slip away.

I can't move my body slowly. I can't move the line slowly. So I end up with way too much, often opaque to me later.