I still had to correct Allen Ginsberg at times when he called women girls. I'd say. Allen please, it's not politically correct.

Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.

I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America.

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.

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.

I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.

We still have our larynx, we still have our minds and we still have our consciousness. We still have this gift to make things with words and images and get outside these preordained tropes and ways of thinking and the master narratives - what's handed to us.