In a way, America's the shadow of everything I do, everywhere I go, everything I carry, no matter if I travel to the ends of the earth. And I live frequently on the spine of the continent, near the Great Divide. Then there's the side of it being the real energy center for a truly post-postmodernist poetry mind, which is also archaic, because we can still be close to the land.

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.

The music is notated first, the text follows. I might have to wait until the right kind of text or form arises. I often see the poems as “scores.”

I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.

My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.

The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.