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

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

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 want literature to open all the doors that I can't open by myself, and to allow me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise see.

If it's a drop of dew, it will dissolve.

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.

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.