The first book that really knocked me out was the ‘Brothers Karamazov.’ I read it when I was a senior in high school.
Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.
Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking.
When I was in high school in the ’50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.
What we usually find is that when people think they have a new idea or approach something for the first time, it is actually a recurrence of a line of thinking explored in the past.
I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, its their only elective, so this is their one shot. Theyll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.
Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.
Golf is a worrier’s game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
A word is elegy to what it signifies.
The Earth forgives the previous year every year.
I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.