Seeing Ron Whitehead for the first time, he immediately gives the impression that he is either an old hippie or someone you really wouldn't want to mess with. Standing well over six feet tall, he wears his hair long, with its mix of blond and gray, and a beard that is wispy and gray that extends about a foot down his chest. He usually dulls his intense blue eyes behind rimless, round glasses, giving him the feel of someone who is older than his fifty-five years. Typically, Ron wears long-sleeved button-down shirts, which hide his numerous, colorful tattoos. Ron Whitehead looks like your wise old grandpa gone awry.

I rode up from Montgomery to Louisville to see Ron and his wife Sarah in late March, as the trees and fields of Tennessee and Kentucky were only beginning to peek through with green. I met Ron a few years earlier working on a poetry book of another non-mainstream poet, and then invited Ron down to Montgomery to read his own poems at the bookstore that I was also working in at the time. That was the first time that I also met Sarah Elizabeth, then not yet his wife, a twenty-something Kentucky singer-songwriter with long brown hair reminiscent of a 1970s Emmylou Harris and with a vocal style to match. What began as Ron alone turned into Ron and Sarah, then quickly escalated into a performance by his on-again/off-again group, The Viking Hillbilly Apocalypse Revue. The group is a hodge-podge of country and bluegrass music, Beat poetry, world rhythms, and a politically conscious sing-along.

Arriving in Louisville, a thriving city of about one million people, I headed for The Highlands, the old neighborhood where the Whiteheads live. The Highlands is an old neighborhood of tall, old trees and tall, old houses that has become an intermingling of bourgeois nostalgia for the past, wealthy families, and a neo-hippie element that congregates in a shopping and restaurant district that is centered around Bardstown Road. Passing by a status of Daniel Boone that is a central feature of nearby Cherokee Park, I found their small apartment building not far off the main drag. Ron answered the door with my glass of red wine, already poured, in his hand. After a catching up over those glasses of wine during the afternoon, we grabbed some dinner at a nearby restaurant. After we had eaten and Ron and I had a couple of glasses more each, Sarah proclaimed that we seemed riled up enough to go home and get started.

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FD: Since you don't really consider yourself a Southern writer, it seems to me that the Beats play pretty big role for you. When did you discover the Beats, or if not that, what led you to them?

Ron: Well, you know, I've had many major influences in my life. I've had mentors. I've had a lot of good English teachers, the earliest being my preacher's wife who took me under her wing as a boy; she saw something in me. . . But my grandfather, the holy roller preacher, he inspired me. My granddad, the musician, inspired me. My parents, as I said, inspired me in their own ways. The first time I heard a gospel quartet in my church, man, I was lifted off the ground . . . And when I heard Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show, that lit a fire under my ass. I got goosebumps all over me. When I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, then started listening to WLS radio, 890 AM, out of Chicago every night. . . . and WLS played all the latest cutting edge rock songs in the early sixties, so that inspired me and that was a big impact on me. Bob Dylan was, early Bob Dylan. And then I was turned on to poetry, to Rumi, the 12th century Sufi mystic poet, who I love to this day. He was a radical in every way. To Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet.