My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you believe in God?

I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst.

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting that human thing.

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 was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.