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

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.

I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.

I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you travel it, who you are traveling it with, what the environment might be, where you're headed, in what direction, the weather and so on.

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.

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

In my teen years and early twenties I was really interested in this fellaheen worlds that, of course, Kerouac invokes and wanting to go below the border and wanting to get to these other places or interstices of the culture where you were encountering the realities of these other kinds of cultures, experiences, language, I think of jazz culture of course.