Amazon.com description: Product Description: Hungry to explore Zen and make the discoveries that would shape a lifetime of poetry, Joanne Kyger left for Japan in her twenties and returned four years later ready to carve out a substantial niche in San Francisco's Beat poetry movement. Whether she is studying under Zen teacher Ruth Fuller Sakaki or meeting with the Dalai Lama (who at 27 "lounged on a velvet couch like a gawky adolescent in red robes"), her journals are witty, amusing, and intelligent, in this fascinating look at the art of poetry and portrait of the counterculture abroad.