Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

If you read three books a day you couldn't read all the poetry that's being published.

If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.

Sometimes you have to be less ashamed about writing a bad poem than you would be about being silent.

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

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.