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.

We pride ourselves at Natrona - I mean, pride {ironically] - on developing a noncompetitive community. That's very important. The values that can come from that kind of meditative work combined with the creative work you do, combined with your activism, can come together.

I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.

I am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

The music is notated first, the text follows. I might have to wait until the right kind of text or form arises. I often see the poems as “scores.”

The color red is symbolic of passion and action, so this Vajrayogini, as she's called, comes with a mantra and she comes with these various weapons and accouterments that are all symbolic of the kind of activity that this principle, as it were, this psychological principle, does or activates in the world. And there's text and mantra as well.