I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.

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

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them. And it can be grand and vast and you can create a realm where you can dwell for a while. Where things are perfect symbols of themselves, no manipulation. And that connects to me to the Buddhist view. From that perspective we can wake up on the spot, be conscious of our world, think of 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 think the idea of the lone tormented artist - which we can apply to others - I think that it needs to be revisited. Jack Kerouac needs to be seen in the context of a lot of other artistic activity.