I think Visions of Cody is the most radical book in terms of poetic stretch and the way Jack Kerouac is able to incorporate documentation and incorporate the live tape recording of Neal and so on.

What I'm after is that wakeful state through language that stays alive.

Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.

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.

I think of the amazing things that were going on. So it's so rich. The doors keep opening.

Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Like the erotic moods they investigate, these versions shimmer and startle with a palpable desire to be heard, and a mystical sense of impermanence. This is a transmission of a vital, extraordinary tradition.

Literal thousands of Americans taking to the road and getting into that green automobile and just going. At the same time there is real incredible work [of art] that comes out of it. Never forget that.