I was in Korea in--
I'm so bad at time.
I think it was July--
July or August.
Wasn't that-- yeah, and it's true.
I can't-- Helen, I had Snearson in the eighth grade.
She discovered that I didn't have
the months of the year in the right order,
and I didn't know them.
I was in Korea for an international Congress--
poets and peace.
It was a peace congress.
We all wrote a poem about peace.
And I gave the keynote address, and we
had one night in the North.
I'll tell you, there's a lot to say about it.
I'll tell you one very striking moment.
We had panels.
We had poets from Brazil, from France, from Turkey,
from Ireland, from England, from Germany, many panels from Japan,
from Malaysia.
One of these panels, we were celebrating.
The occasion for this was the 60th anniversary of Korean
independence.
And in the very weird, very oppressive,
very strange North, of which we got only a glimpse.
And in the South, there were banners showing the peninsula
without a line through it.
And it was very moving.
Very, very astonishingly important to those
people that they could even think about having their country
be one country again.
And the great contrast between this tremendous prosperity
and unsettling Westernization in the South, and this
really terrific you know starvation and oppression
in the North.
I'll give you one striking moment to me.
One of the very last panels, there
was a very elegant Japanese poet,
who gave a marvelous, poetic talk about the Bo tree,
under which the Buddha was--
when he dies, the flowers come down
and his mother gave birth to him under it, and it was very--
a young woman in the question period--
a young woman in the audience, a young woman
who is ethnic Korean, but an American citizen,
she spoke perfect Korean.
She was teaching at a University in Korea.
She said two things had bothered her.
One of them had bothered me too.
The other hadn't occurred to me.
She said she was bothered by the chauvinism about the Buddhist
view of life and the Korean view of life that
had not been questioned.
That people had talked about resisting the West
and correcting the West, and there has never
been any reservation about that.
And then she said something that I felt very stupid
and had not occurred to me.
She said the other thing--
remember, there's a Japanese poet on the panel too.
She says, the other thing that bothers me is that
we're celebrating the 60th anniversary of Korean
independence.
When we were celebrating the 60th anniversary of Korean
independence, what we were also celebrating is the dropping
of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And she said I'd like to hear members of the panel comment
on those two things.
And I'm here to tell you, the four--
it happened to be all-male.
I don't want to be male baiting, or curry favor
in some feminist way.
But the five guys on the panel, some of them
attempted to respond to the first thing she said, none
of them, including the Japanese poet responded
to the second thing she said.
I just tell you that as a striking story.
I don't know what the point of it is exactly,
but there's something.