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

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

One thing we do know is that mass literacy is a product of the 19th century, at least in English-speaking cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, and the U. S.

Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.

Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.