It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work.

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration.

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.

For me the road became a zone, in places like Saint Marks poetry Project where I worked for 12 years.

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.

It's so rich as a trope - the whole idea of the road and it being in terms of language, being an active experience.