ABSTRACT
When I decided, as my contribution to the Dialogue on the Korean War, to look for poems on the Korean War written by Korean poets, I had no idea what I was going to find. Apart from one “patriotic” poem by a woman poet that I had read in a middle school textbook, I simply had never come across any poem dealing with the Korean War experience until 1998—that is, until I was fifty. Admittedly, I am not a Korean literature major, and I tend to read more fiction than poetry, but it seemed really odd that the only poem on the Korean War that I knew of was by a woman who never participated directly in the war.
