The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.

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

I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'

For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.

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.