Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.

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

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

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