The whole red state/blue state thing is very interesting. Watching that shift over the years.
I have students whose fathers are voting for Sarah Palin. It's wild.
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 fundamentalist Christian background that was very much like a cult and of course they struggle to get to Naropa. And they have cut themselves off. They don't look back.
World War II synchronizes things for a lot of people. There's a kind of wakeup call.
The beat literary movement is strong because of those very challenging and individual relationships and styles and contention and so on. So I just feel blessed by this kind of opportunity that came from it. It was a kind of seed.
Allen's [Gisberg] loyalty to his friends was extraordinary. And as he was dying he was calling people: "What can I do for you before I die? Do you need money? What can I do?".
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 Lyndon Johnson to work with alienated youth on the lower East side. This was extraordinary, to be able to help then to create a culture that would capture the energy that I felt at Berkley.
You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment.
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 able to hold two different ideas 'without any irritable reach after fact or reason.'
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 was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism.
Think of the road as a kind of zone and a site of incredible diversity.
The dichotomies, the brokenness of the culture around things like the Vietnam war, and then a lot of it has to do with war and where we put our energy and money and attention. And the military industrial complex, which dominates our whole economy. Even with the vision of democracy in other places we know the dark side.
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.
I don't demonize the downside. As we've seen in Egypt and Tahrir square and other recent event, the adhesiveness through [technology] kinds of communication is extraordinary. Interesting times we live in.
How can you work on letting your thoughts go and getting synchronized into the moment and questioning your wild imagination. But I say just think of all the great Japanese and Chinese poets and scholars who were also meditators.
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'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down.
If you can integrate your life to have a kind of meditative practice that is considering others.
I get very upset when money is being cut and people can't visit the Grand Canyon.
I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces.
I remember being caught in this earthquake in Mexico City and having a sense of people coming before me, of being part of this lineage. I felt similarly when I went to India and South America.
[Jack] Kerouac looking at the fellaheen worlds. Looking at other cultures. Welcoming it, curious. Really stepping outside his own limited, whatever that narrow world was. It's amazing to think we can do it. We can have that same kind of trajectory of mind.
Connection to Buddhism is strand in my life.
It was really hard coming to terms with the Nazi history. Then in my twenties I was traveling to Germany. There was a lot of poetry activity and some of my first readings abroad and trying to relate with people my own age there and what they were discovering and learning had to examine in terms of their backgrounds. Then so many of my friends had family who had either perished in the holocaust or survived in the holocaust. It was very palpable.
