By ANDY JACKSON
Marmot??s Hole Guest Blogger
(NOTE: I am going to quote from an article on page 4 of the August 18, 2005 addition of the Korea Herald entitled ‘Poetry and politics at Mt. Geumgang.’ I didn’t find it on the Korea Herald web page. If any readers come across it, I’d appreciate a link.)
More than once I have heard that poets are seekers of truth. That may be, but my mind most associates poetry with college English Departments back in the States. For anyone who is not familiar with the American campus scene, English departments are notorious as dens of often petty and usually underpaid hacks of political correctness who spend their lives stabbing each other in the back while grading students on their ability to accept and regurgitate their pet political (and sometimes literary) theories.
So when I read the headline ‘Poetry and politics at Mt. Geumgang’ I did not have high hopes. I was expecting more of the same kind of whitewashing I had seen during the recent Liberation Day festivities.
I was pleasantly surprised when I read this:
(After being informed that a group of North Korean poets would not be joining the event) Officially, the group was told, the North Koreans were preoccupied with other exchanges going on with South Korea for the liberation anniversary. They were too busy to send a group of poets.
The next day, however, in an interview with reporters in the hotel parking lot, Nobel winner (Wole) Soyinka scoffed at the explanation for the North Koreans’ absence.
He was more than disappointed by the news, he said. “I was furious. I find it outrageous that poets anywhere in the world need official permission to meet other poets.”
I would certainly like to see at least a little more scoffing at some of the absurdities emanating from Pyeongyang Seoul these days. Does it really take a Nigerian Poet to tell people that they are being lied to?
BTW, here is a pretty good site on Soyinka. Also, this biography might explain his impatience with the North Koreans. He spent almost two years as a political prisoner.
4 Comments
Anybody have a link to English translations of nork poetry? I can almost imagine it already, but I’d like to see some. I doubt it’s anything like, say, Paul Celan’s:
“A word - you know:
a corpse.
Let us wash it,
let us comb it,
let us turn its eye
towards heaven.”
“I find it outrageous that poets anywhere in the world need official permission to meet other poets.”
Why? Being a poet gives you a license to be above other people? This is NK where KJI can execute entire village if he wants to. Or, make every girl in the region to be his concubine.
He is a god. He or his peon can kill you easily.
Have you heard about “Dead Poet’s Society”?
Andy/??????????? ????:
That was an interesting (if off-topic) article that you linked to on English Department petty politics, by the way.
Off-topic, too, but if you want to see just how twisted and surreal academia can get, check out Prof. Darrel Hamamoto’s “work”:
http://www.mastersofthepillow.com/