My older brother was involved in the folk movement. We would gather every weekend in Washington Park. The folk songs were so important to my reality.

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.

Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.

I was going to public school in the post-World War II, the grey doldrum years. But I was in this extraordinary environment of Manhattan, of Greenwich Village, of bohemian parents.

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 am a self-appointed ambassador for poetry.

Certainly the beat writers I've known who carried forward the original, you know, I'd say that came together in the 1940s and 50s. So I was inheriting in a way some of that ethos.