Yet Oeur, despite writing in traditional forms, has also offered a critical lens on the innovation and future of Cambodian form poetry: “I know these traditional forms and can write in them, which I sometimes do, but I also feel that in many ways our traditions are what allowed us to become victims—we took things for granted, we had become hidebound and ossified,” he said in a 2001 interview with The Cambodia Daily regarding his writing on the Khmer Rouge era.