The #MeToo Poem That Brought Down Korea’s Most Revered Poet

Choi Young-mi (left) and Ko Un (right).

The accusation came in the form of a poem. Six stanzas. Twenty-seven lines.

Don’t sit next to En
The poet ‘K’ advised me, a literary novice
He touches young women whenever he sees one

Choi Young-mi wrote the poem in Korean, her native tongue. It is a language that tends first to cool its emotions, then to assimilate them; unruly drama and dialogue, in their retelling, take on the muted affect of melancholy. This poem, largely unbroken by punctuation and carried by winding lines, swirls like a river.

A handful of English characters litter the poem and stand out like islands, insistent and unyielding. They are mostly names: ‘K,’ who warns the young poet about En, an older poet some thirty years her senior, who gropes the young poet and women like her. There is one English phrase, too, isolated on its own line in the poem’s second stanza: “Me too.”

Forgot K’s advice and Me too The silk blouse borrowed from my sister got rumpled