Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.

You can get a sense of the wonderful power of framing by holding your fingers up in a kind of square, walking around the room and framing it differently - how that changes the nature of what you think the room is like.

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

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.

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.

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'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.