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."

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.

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.

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 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.

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