Kim Hyesoon

Born :

1955

Women are foils to men in South Korea. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance. Men think women should do trivial things on the margins. They think women should be merely a seasoning for a dish. I feel anger and sorrow seeing this.

korea men thinking

We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become "the paper made of human meat," we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play.

skins knowing play

I have to reach "the poetry condition" to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.

conditions borders writing

Once, I compared poetry to mothers in my book called To Write as a Woman, because my mother is someone who captures me in her body and gave birth to me out of her desire but washed her hands of me after giving birth to me as a poet.

mother writing book

We have certain rules for traditional lyric poetry in Korea. I twist my body, confused by what to say and how to act, facing these rules. Confronting traditional lyricism, I speak with a bare body without the tattoos of culture on it.

korea confused tattoo

Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.

flower mother giving

Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.

body gone mother

Since the boundary of the world of poetry is fluid, the language in it is also fluid. Hence, the language that is outside of the poetry world, namely the language that is not the language of poetry, cannot go into the poetry world.

language boundaries world

Poems are a dance of language that comes out when my body taps into the rhythm of language. Rhythm gets us naked and exposes our selves completely.

naked body self

It is difficult to disturb the common usage of Korean that is bent to the perspective of a male-oriented society. Korean society is based on both a politics and history that have been disguised as a solid society of solid male poems, a solid written language, fixed rules of how to write literature, and a narrative language.

perspective literature writing

Alienation between the content and form happens frequently in my poems because I obstinately carry on dismantling my body, an act you can also call "dismantling delusion." I think that after I dismantle my female body, I can finally dismantle established lyric poems.

female body thinking

In my opinion, poets talk through the symptoms of disease. These symptoms of disease are predictions, screams, and songs.

opinion disease song

Men think women should do trivial things on the margins. They think women should be merely a seasoning for a dish. I feel anger and sorrow seeing this.

sorrow men thinking

The body of poetry is nothing but energy, waves, rhythm. by Kim Hyesoon

The body of poetry is nothing but energy, waves, rhythm.

wave body energy

My body is full of graves. A sepulcher is dug up, and a young girl comes out of it with her dusty hands in tears. A lady who is a young girl and an old girl at the same time feels the presence of the young girl. I feel that the 15-year-old me and the 50-year-old me come out of the sepulcher through an illegal excavation.

girl hands years

There is a specific kind of day when I feel like writing poems. My senses become really sharp. This day is when I feel as if I am drowning into the abandonment of death.

abandonment kind writing

The rhythm of my body is the same as my mother tongue. It is in this rhythm where I find sanctity, that I can return to my mother who is everywhere in the universe.

tongue return mother

In poetry, rhythm is a priority above everything else. by Kim Hyesoon

In poetry, rhythm is a priority above everything else.

rhythm priorities

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.

writing remember way

Korean feminism has been swept away by popular culture. It became a sort of old-fashioned trend or a joke.

feminism trends culture