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

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 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.

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.

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

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."