As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed.

It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work.

For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.

How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.

Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it.

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.