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.
What I propose for the "life of a poet" goes against the grain of the fossil fuel monoculture. Maybe the most revolutionary act these days is not to watch television and to read a book a day at least.
I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.
My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father's life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.
Personally there is first: imagination; second: the act of writing - and third: the act/act of vocalizing.
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, oppression. Alternative spaces-perhaps this kind of communication can take place over the Net? Probably only up to a point as the Net's controlled by the military. But the idea is to live outside multi-national, monocultural, commodification prison, outside the grey areas of power-mad, monied collusion.
How infuriating it is to be continually born to war that continues one's whole lifetime, even as one protests it - what futility. It is perhaps a more public epic in this regard, and carries a ritual vocalization.
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.
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.
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 card-carrying communist party member but I think its possible.
I'm curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it's still a very lively ethos. It's a kind of practice. It's an ethos that is very sustaining.
There is a pretty interesting document called 'action writing.' Which is not all about spontaneity and first thought, best thought,' but a certain kind of attention to the smallest increments of the phonemes of language, The kind of power of connection, what he is able to do with language.
In my teen years and early twenties I was really interested in this fellaheen worlds that, of course, Kerouac invokes and wanting to go below the border and wanting to get to these other places or interstices of the culture where you were encountering the realities of these other kinds of cultures, experiences, language, I think of jazz culture of course.
One has to be cautious and respectful of the power of the "substance" guides. I don't advocate imbibing the "little saint children," as Maria Sabina calls the magic mushrooms, or anything else for everyone. I find that certain substances reconnect me to a primal context of purpose that goes beyond identity and ownership. The writing-when I've worked it this way-is the kind of information you take back from dreams. Or it's hypnotic writing rather than getting off on some sort of pleasure trip or intellectual trip.
I don't think it is as a trope or as something in our psyches. There's very little wilderness out there but there is wild mind, and the Wild mind that actually, as Gary Snyder says, wants to take care of things. There's an elegant quality to the wild mind.
The color red is symbolic of passion and action, so this Vajrayogini, as she's called, comes with a mantra and she comes with these various weapons and accouterments that are all symbolic of the kind of activity that this principle, as it were, this psychological principle, does or activates in the world. And there's text and mantra as well.
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 pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that.
My mother actually left American in 1929 to be part of an alternative community of bohemians around her then father-in-law who was a well-known Greek poet. This group of people were living in this semi-Luddite reality and weaving their own clothes - proto-hippies in a way- -but around an artistic vision.
I grew up in New York City in Greenwich Village and had parents who were somewhat bohemian so I was always on the nonconformist side of the equation.
It was a little harder when I first went to Egypt when I was 18 years old and being a white woman with a knapsack and in blue jeans. But again I was part of the rucksack revolution there was some grace there. You could put it that way. And confidence as well because I thought of myself as a poet. That was part of it. I was going for that, to have experiences to make the work.
I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone.
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 abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman.
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 think of my father growing up in South Jersey, the son of second-generation German immigrant glassblowers. The opportunities for him of feeling that aspiration, that yearning, get out of the small town, connect to a larger world, get yourself to New York, wanting to play the piano at every opportunity, bonding with people who were on a similar path, ending up in Provincetown, which was kind of nexus for nonconformity, and artistic dropout reality.
I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story.
