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

Obviously, if I'm reading in Vienna or Venezuela or Italy, there's the issue of language, and I will make choices that are more sound oriented. Or I'll try to incorporate those languages and occasions somehow.

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.

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.

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.

There's a kind of training, when you are sitting in a session in the Japanese tradition or any of the Buddhist traditions, taking your lotus posture or whatever it is. That's what you're doing.

I did go to Vietnam in 2000 as a kind of pilgrimage and to feel my generation was very much a part of this. I felt responsible but also connected and empathetic. It was a very complicated relationship we had, whichever side you were on. The shock of being there was very few people my own age - I was primarily in the North in the streets of Hanoi. A whole generation was essentially decimated.