My father was a frustrated writer. I think he wanted to write the great American novel.

As a woman I have felt encouraged and fed by and nurtured by the work of [Jack] Kerouac and others.

[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.

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

When [Allen] Ginsberg and I founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics - that was 1974 - we referred to it by a term used by Sufi thinker Hakim Bey, as "temporary autonomous zones." That for me sums up some of Whitman's sense of a community of likeminded people with a certain kind of adhesiveness and connection and sharing of this ethos.

If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.

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.