The first time I came across your name I was a teenager sneaking out from the burbs to visit Greenwich Village which was, in my young imagination, a very exotic place to be. Every weekend my friends and I would go to the Night Owl Café to listen to the Lovin’ Spoonful and the Blues Magoos until one day someone said, let’s go around the corner to the Café Wha (I think that was it) and listen to the Fugs. When I was 21, I read The Family. Years later, when I moved to the Catskills, I learned that you were also a poet so I’m pleased to have the opportunity to interview you now. In prepping for this interview, I went to the Internet and found out a lot of other interesting facts about you.

For instance, in 1982 you performed your now-famous Henri Matisse concept piece, with an instrument you built called “The Pulse Lyre.” What was that about?
I was always struck by Henri Matisse’s late-life colored gouache cut-outs. He’d been very sick, and was confined to a wheelchair, and yet, with an assistant, he was, not long before he passed away, able to create a series of wall-sized cut-out collages that remain some of the towering artworks of the 20th century. Even though he could no longer paint or sculpt, he created works such as “The Swimming Pool,” “Large Decoration with Masks,” “The Negress,” “Memory of Oceania,” “Women and Monkeys” and the smaller “Blue Nude” series.

He adjusted his art to the skills that he had available, and I think that’s the duty of any creative person, always to adjust ones art forms to fit ones changing abilities.

What are the “Fugs?”
The Fugs are a musical/poetic group that was founded in late 1964 by me and Tuli Kupferberg whom I’d met on the Lower East Side. My bookstore, the Peace Eye Bookstore, was located next to his apartment.

It was the year of the Beatles’ “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” and the Shangrilas’ “Leader of the Pack.” Plus it was the Freedom Summer year, and Kennedy had not long before been assassinated. It was time for the Fugs, who, in their now 45-year history, have put out a string of albums and CD, the most recent being Be Free, the Fugs Final CD (Part 2), which will come out this fall.

What prompted you to write The Family?
I was interested in the so-called Manson murder case from the start. It didn’t make sense. I’d been in LA a number of times with the Fugs during those years, and so I decided to look into the case. The Fugs were no longer performing, and I’d just completed my first solo album for Warner/Reprise, Sanders Truckstop, and so I had time. My book, The Family, was published in late 1971. It’s been in print ever since.

I understand you have a degree in Classics from NYU. How does that inform your art?
I was very very impressed with Greek lyric poetry, such as Sappho, Anacreon and Archilochus, who all wrote in very complicated meters. It is the complicated meters of the ancients that have always inspired my poetry

I read an interview with you a few years ago that mentioned a biography of Anton Chekhov in the form of a 240-page poem you were working on. Did you ever finish that work?
Yes, Chekhov, a biography in verse, was published in 1995 by Black Sparrow Press, in Santa Barbara. I think it’s still available from Black Sparrow/David Godine Books.

How does it feel to have been called “a bridge between the Beat and Hippie generations?”
A lot of people have been walking across that bridge. I wish they would do it barefoot.

As an early environmentalist, do you have any words for this Age?
Always tithe your time. That is, give a little sliver of your personal time every single day:

1. to make a cleaner, less cancer-causing world;

2. help the organic food movement (like, help make it more affordable;

3. go out in a blaze of leaflets.

You are a poet, musician, non-fiction writer, newspaper publisher: Which of these is your most important form of expression?
I always view myself as a bard. That is a poet who makes also public statements on local, regional and national issues.