No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pre….

For me there is a poesis, a poetics, around the trope of the road that is embedded within many life experiences of the people I've been close to..

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

I'd like to invoke the Native American Navajo because their word for road is used as a verb. Their whole relationship to road has to do with how you ….

The sense of the preciousness of the body - vehicle for poetry..

To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the word….

When students are first at the Kerouac School we harp on Gertrude Stein's very basic poetic insistence that words are things . Not to invalidate your….

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism..

The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just fe….

This will be a good time for poetry, you know, when things get darker and stranger and your very speech is being questioned and the sense of trusting….

Contemporary movies just drive me crazy. The violence and the sentimentality and the spiritual materialism and Theism and the incredible indulgence i….

I had a student some years ago whose father had worked on the Manhattan Project. I had a student who had to escape this very intense, born-again fund….

I think of my father growing up in South Jersey, the son of second-generation German immigrant glassblowers. The opportunities for him of feeling tha….

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration..

There's that older poem of John Ashbery's-"America"-with the pun "I'm a wrecker," so wreckage and building out of the ashes of that. We're haunted by….

The text for me is the musical score. I'm the instrument. My voice is the instrument. My voice is articulating the sounds which are coming through th….

The puzzle and conundrums of Emily Dickinson's poetry or The Cantos, by Ezra Pound, is infinitely pleasurable. Or Ronald Johnson's Ark. And the exper….

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 wo….

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….

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the mig….

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..