Ko Un Is A Crucial Poet For

[osip] Mandelstam, Who Wasn't A Political Thinker, Loved The Idea Of The City-state. One Of The Emblems In His Poetry Of The Politics He Imagined, Over And Against The Universalizing Politics Of [carl] Marx, Was The Medieval City Of Novgorod, Which Had In Its Center A Public Well Where The Water Was Free To Everyone. That Became For Him A Figure Of Justice.

Another Problem About Writing About Politics In The "age Of Globalization" Is That So Much Of The Violence In The Form Of War And Also In The Forms Of Institutional Violence - Sweatshops, Child Labor, Victimization Of People Economically - Happens Elsewhere And Out Of Sight. And When We Do Know About It And Need To Witness It, It's Always Mediated By Images Of One Kind Or Another, So You're Kind Of Stuck Trying To Write About What It's Like Trying To Be You Living Your Life Thinking About And Experiencing This Stuff In That Way.

After A While I Understood That, Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves: Justice, Pine, Hair, Woman, You And I. There Was A Woman I Made Love To And I Remembered How, Holding Her Small Shoulders In My Hands Sometimes, I Felt A Violent Wonder At Her Presence Like A Thirst For Salt, For My Childhood River With Its Island Willows, Silly Music From The Pleasure Boat, Muddy Places Where We Caught The Little Orange-silver Fish Called Pumpkinseed. It Hardly Had To Do With Her. Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

Milton Was The First Person Who Really Experimented With Putting Politics Into Sonnets.

Images Are Not Quite Ideas, They Are Stiller Than That, With Less Implication Outside Themselves. And They Are Not Myth, They Do Not Have The Explanatory Power; They Are Nearer To Pure Story. Nor Are They Always Metaphors; They Do Not Say This Is That, They Say This Is.