I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War.

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

Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.

My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.