I like the idea of the object, the relic. And I see it as a time machine too or a device you plug into a socket that activates a sound and light show.

Allen's [Gisberg] loyalty to his friends was extraordinary. And as he was dying he was calling people: "What can I do for you before I die? Do you need money? What can I do?".

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence in ignorance is so claustrophobic.

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.

Our need to reimagine our world through the vibratory larynx, that's what matters. Re-awaken the world to itself. Through ideas, pictures, sounds. Hold the mirror up to "nature."

Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation.

It was really hard coming to terms with the Nazi history. Then in my twenties I was traveling to Germany. There was a lot of poetry activity and some of my first readings abroad and trying to relate with people my own age there and what they were discovering and learning had to examine in terms of their backgrounds. Then so many of my friends had family who had either perished in the holocaust or survived in the holocaust. It was very palpable.