I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.

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

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide.

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest of consciousness.

I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.