Milton was the first person who really experimented with putting politics into sonnets.

When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.

There isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington - one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.

It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.

The professionalization of poetry, or the balkanization, has come out of the fact that when you apply to most creative writing programs, you have to choose your genre.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.