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

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land.

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.

If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.

How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.

Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination.