The music is notated first, the text follows. I might have to wait until the right kind of text or form arises. I often see the poems as “scores.”

There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.

We pride ourselves at Natrona - I mean, pride {ironically] - on developing a noncompetitive community. That's very important. The values that can come from that kind of meditative work combined with the creative work you do, combined with your activism, can come together.

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.

Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.

Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.

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.