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

A lot of my father's generation were thinking about communism and had deep liberal and progressive connections. He never admitted whether he was a ca….

Refined, intense, wise, stiring, immediate, subtile, all the charmed qualities gather in Dropping the Bow. These translations are precious jewels. Li….

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..

I think for me in terms of this kind of dichotomy you have to hold the sense of negative capability in your mind - which is Keats line about being ab….

My mother started taking us to church when I was in seventh or eight grade. That was always a question, Do you believe in God?.

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….

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now..

I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from a….

My teachers were often very eccentric..

Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities becau….

There's a numbness in our culture to the continuing horrors of genocide..

We humans need to do better with our vast minds and alchemical powers. Future radial poetries might be more symbiotic with the rest of consciousness..

America's the great conundrum and the great dream and the great fascination: the new land, the new world, the new temple, the new city, and the great….

When I got back to NY had the opportunity to work with the beginning years of the poetry project which was founded with money from the OEO under Lynd….

There are energies that reside in each phone and phoneme. And we can release them..

Any technology is just a skillful means and it's how you use it..

My last bedside conversation in the hospital just a few weeks before Allen Ginsberg died was 'please take care of so and so. And the legacy of the Ke….

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 ….

The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years..

Spiritual models for me are the communities of Tibetans living in exile in India, or the banjars of Bali, which exist in times of difficulty, oppress….