I'm drawn to the magical efficacies of language as a political act.

The sense of traveling this continent, also other continents. The friendship.I would say a non-competitive friendship. That is so amazing to me.

It was really hard coming to terms with the Nazi history. Then in my twenties I was traveling to Germany. There was a lot of poetry activity and some of my first readings abroad and trying to relate with people my own age there and what they were discovering and learning had to examine in terms of their backgrounds. Then so many of my friends had family who had either perished in the holocaust or survived in the holocaust. It was very palpable.

I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.

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.

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.

One has to be cautious and respectful of the power of the "substance" guides. I don't advocate imbibing the "little saint children," as Maria Sabina calls the magic mushrooms, or anything else for everyone. I find that certain substances reconnect me to a primal context of purpose that goes beyond identity and ownership. The writing-when I've worked it this way-is the kind of information you take back from dreams. Or it's hypnotic writing rather than getting off on some sort of pleasure trip or intellectual trip.