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

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.

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

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them.

In a way, America's the shadow of everything I do, everywhere I go, everything I carry, no matter if I travel to the ends of the earth. And I live frequently on the spine of the continent, near the Great Divide. Then there's the side of it being the real energy center for a truly post-postmodernist poetry mind, which is also archaic, because we can still be close to the land.

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

I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.