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.

My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry.

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

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.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.