Ko Un Is A Crucial Poet For

I Think That Poets Can Say, "what We Want Is For Everybody On Earth To Wake Up Free From Fear And With Access To Medicine And Clean Water And Education." But I Don't Think Poets Have Any Special Insight On How To Get There. And The 20th Century Is A Pretty Good Record Of That Because So Many Of The Great Poets Were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, Etc. They Wrote Their Odes To Lenin And Stalin. They Glorified Some Of The Most Violent And Grotesque Dictatorships Of The 20th Century. And A Lot Of The Ones Who Were Not Stalinists Were Fascists Or Fascist Sympathizers.

One Way To Escape The Universe In Which Everything Is A Kind Of Media Cartoon Is To Write About The Part Of Your Life That Doesn't Feel Like A Cartoon, And How The Cartoon Comes Into It.

Pound Described Poetry As Original Research In Language, And Just As Formal Experiment In Poetry Has To Try Things And Has To Go Too Far, So Does Experiment With Writing About Politics In Poetry And What The Politics Of Poetry Is.

When I Applied To Stanford, I Applied For Graduate Work In The Phd Program, Not To The Creative Writing Program, Mostly Because Though I Had Some Vague Ambition Of Becoming A Writer And I Was Trying To Write Poems And Essays And Stories, I Didn't Feel Like I Was Far Enough Along To Submit Work To Some Place And Have It Judged.

The Poem That Comes Closest To Saying What I Think Is The One In Human Wishes Called "rusia En 1931." This Poem Is About [osip] Mandelstam, Who Was A Great Poet And An Anti-stalinist, And [cesar] Vallejo, Who Was A Great Poet And A Stalinist.