There's that older poem of John Ashbery's-"America"-with the pun "I'm a wrecker," so wreckage and building out of the ashes of that. We're haunted by the genocide that is America, the decimation of so many native cultures. As a mix-blood European ancestry American, you're a nexus of all those violences, and yet there's a relative personal identity as well.

Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.

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.

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to.

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.

What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.