If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

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

I don't know that I had a sense that there was such a thing as "the poetry world" in the 1960s and early 70s. Maybe poets did, but for me as an onlooker and reader of poetry, poetry felt like it was part of a larger literary world. I mean, even the phrase "the poetry world" reflects a sort of balkanization of American literary and artistic life that has to some extent happened since then.

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

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from [John] Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."