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.

If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know.

I think a lot of American poets are swimming-pool Soviets. A lot of them have taken the comfortable, self-protective route too often. I know that I certainly have. That's easy to do.

Galway Kinnell came out with that wonderful big, breathy, hollow voice of his and read, for the first time in public, "The Bear." That poem impressed me so much that I memorized it. I used it for years when I taught in prisons. It's a powerful extended metaphor for what the writing life is really all about. It's a uniquely powerful poem about self-transformation, and that's what we're asking, really, beyond even our objection to the war. We're asking people to look at themselves and think about what might be possible with a little self-transformation.

Nothing will change until we demolish the "we-they" mentality. We are human, and therefore all human concerns are ours. And those concerns are personal.

Ho Kyuns poetry is in the tradition of his master, the incomparable Tu Fu, while remaining fully his own. Writing nine centuries later, Hos poetry strikes many parallels--the experiences of war and exile and constant struggle-- and his voice is similarly humane. This is rich and enlightening reading.

The only thing we all agree on, virtually every poet in this country, is that this Administration is really frightening, and we want something done about it.