I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it's so rich. The doors keep opening.

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them.

To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the words or the poetry or the lines of thought. Memory's going extinct because we rely on machines and copies and so on. The idea of working with structures that conjure dreams, personages, history, time, that can be contained in this way as you walk through your mind, is a challenge.

When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

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.