My teachers were often very eccentric.

Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

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 like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.

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

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.