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

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.

Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

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.

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."

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