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

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.

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.

Each of us is present, but partially.

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 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.

I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.