For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.

Each of us is present, but partially.

I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems.

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.

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.

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.

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.