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

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

Language is as fragile as the little alpine plant.

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."

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

Each of us is present, but partially.