For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.
Anne WaldmanI think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.
Anne WaldmanIn my teen years and early twenties I was really interested in this fellaheen worlds that, of course, Kerouac invokes and wanting to go below the border and wanting to get to these other places or interstices of the culture where you were encountering the realities of these other kinds of cultures, experiences, language, I think of jazz culture of course.
Anne WaldmanWhen [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos.
Anne Waldman