I hope I'm not implying role of contemporary poet for myself, although there's a kind of resonant paradigm. It's traditionally a difficult role.

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

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

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.'

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.

When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos.