I haven't seen any poet in this country behave nearly as rudely as Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly. I'm not asking these people to approve of everyone's manners. I don't feel obliged to defend the manners of every poet who submits a poem to my web site. That's not my job. My job is to provide them with an opportunity to speak from the heart. If there's not much in the heart and if the mouth is running wild, that's not my problem.

I can remember, I think it was 1967, sitting in the First Unitarian Church in Isla Vista, Santa Barbara, and seeing Phil Levine come out on the little stage. He sat on the edge and said, "You know, sometimes it's hard not to hate my country for the way I feel, at times, but I won't let that happen." And then he read, "They Feed They Lion," this incredibly powerful, incantatory poem that was inspired in part by the burning of Detroit in 1967 and the riots that followed.

I haven't seen any poet in this country behave nearly as rudely as Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly. I'm not asking these people to approve of everyone's manners. I don't feel obliged to defend the manners of every poet who submits a poem to my web site. That's not my job. My job is to provide them with an opportunity to speak from the heart. If there's not much in the heart and if the mouth is running wild, that's not my problem.

Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?"

I wrote a number of poems about Kah Tai lagoon, when Safeway was building that huge, ugly store down there where I used to love to watch the birds nest. That political poem, or environmental poem, was unsuccessful because Safeway built there anyway. And yet the poem has something to say today, as it did then. And I speak here only of my own poems. The agenda for every poet has to be different because most of us write from direct human experience in the world.

All I'd ever heard my entire life in my family was, "Nobody wanted you, and we took you in." When you get that into your head at a tender age, you really feel like you are an unlovable human being, and then you behave like one. That's exactly what I had done. It took me many years to deal with my own violence and find my own niche.

Korea's first Zen Master-poet wrote simple yet elegant poetry of the world he inhabited, both physically and spiritually, and of daily insights-a pause along the way for a deep clear breath, a moon-viewing moment, a seasonal note or a farewell poem to a departing monk. His poems speak softly and clearly, like hearing a temple bell that was struck a thousand years ago.