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

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.

I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.

Your compassion travels beyond your own inner circle. And then you breathe out an alternative version where you mentally and emotionally and psychologically purify the poisons. So indeed, the generative idea is in the crux of this practice and of my propensity toward poetry, which is a practice of the imagination.

The formal stuff feels old and windy. Not to say you shouldn't know prosody. But it's a wonderful time for exploratory poetics. Contemporary poets are inventing all kinds of wild, complex shapes for poetry, as we see. It's a wonderful time, less ego-centered.

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.

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.