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.

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.

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.

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.

Often poets fall into groups that exclude others, and don't pay attention to those who write in different ways. It seems so limited to me.

Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France).

I think about the kinds of gardens that Queen Elizabeth put up. She made gardens in the shape of an "E," for Elizabeth, just one more way in which she used symbolism to solidify her reign: appearing as the Virgin Queen, for example, or wearing a dress embroidered with eyes and ears to indicate that she knew all that was going on in her castle; she had spies.