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.

I did go to Vietnam in 2000 as a kind of pilgrimage and to feel my generation was very much a part of this. I felt responsible but also connected and empathetic. It was a very complicated relationship we had, whichever side you were on. The shock of being there was very few people my own age - I was primarily in the North in the streets of Hanoi. A whole generation was essentially decimated.

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 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 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.

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.

My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Kerouac school.