If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality.

Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.

Spiritual models for me are the communities of Tibetans living in exile in India, or the banjars of Bali, which exist in times of difficulty, oppression. Alternative spaces-perhaps this kind of communication can take place over the Net? Probably only up to a point as the Net's controlled by the military. But the idea is to live outside multi-national, monocultural, commodification prison, outside the grey areas of power-mad, monied collusion.

When students are first at the Kerouac School we harp on Gertrude Stein's very basic poetic insistence that words are things . Not to invalidate your experience or all the great feelings you have, I tell them. Although poetry may be good for you, it's not therapy. You're making something with words which are visceral, muscular, active, not just markers of how you feel. And we have classes studying William Blake, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Stein.

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

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting that human thing.