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.

A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.

My mother actually left American in 1929 to be part of an alternative community of bohemians around her then father-in-law who was a well-known Greek poet. This group of people were living in this semi-Luddite reality and weaving their own clothes - proto-hippies in a way- -but around an artistic vision.

I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.

Poets have to keep pushing, pushing, against the darkness, and write their way out of it as well.

I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.