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

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

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.

There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.

When I got back to NY had the opportunity to work with the beginning years of the poetry project which was founded with money from the OEO under Lyndon Johnson to work with alienated youth on the lower East side. This was extraordinary, to be able to help then to create a culture that would capture the energy that I felt at Berkley.

We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.

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