I can't remember the past, or I can't see very clearly, or I've gotten older and the person I was isn't there anymore, and the place I grew up isn't where I live now.
A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.
I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems.
The days start to be charged not because tomorrow you're leaving, but because in three weeks you're leaving. The future impinges. So you start to think about the frame.
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.
Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.
I'm in California, so I know people who are natives who tell me there's lots of weather here, but it's not the same as being in Vermont. Since I grew up on the East Coast I miss that weather all the time. You'd think I'd get used to not having it, but I don't.
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.
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.
I try to attach myself to things around me so that they don't slip away.
I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.
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.
Language is as fragile as the little alpine plant.
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.
I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.
I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested in imagery. I think part of it is my training, and just my visual sense of things.
I'm really interested in what you remember, how you remember, what your perspective is as opposed to somebody else's.
Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes.
Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.
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.
Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France).
I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of reading.
If it's a drop of dew, it will dissolve.
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.
