Kim Hyesoon Quotes

If you happen to live in Korea, you might always suffer from anger towards people in power, because of political and social problems. I felt gloomy under this social dictatorship. Looking back, I feel like I never saw a sunrise in Seoul.

Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.

I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Women in Korean myths disappear after giving birth. The reason they were born is to produce sons.

Korean feminism is on the brink of death. Korea has a less clear boundary between popular literature and serious literature than in other countries. I feel that feminism is abandoned like a product that was a craze in the past.

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

My mom does not exist anymore, and I cannot see my mother in myself. To me, the word "mother" is the synonym for the words "parting" or "separation" or "farewell."

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.

When I became a poet, the Korean literary world expected women poets to sing passively of love. Naturally, this was not written anywhere, but this rule existed nonetheless. Consequently, I received plenty of serious criticism.

When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.

I am a tomb robber who is robbing my own tomb. Things from my tomb are exhibited under the radiant sun. Every time it happens I feel crude.

My tough and grotesque images were thrown on the roads and were stepped on by my critics, and I was talked about with scorn. I felt regret that readers only seemed to like something they were accustomed to.

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.

You cannot call a poem female just because it is written by a woman. Nevertheless, I think attempts to find femininity in female bodies, life, and thinking, attempts to find a way for women to speak, will improve widely in Korea.

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.

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.

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.

The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.

Living in South Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in.

It seems Korean women are enjoying a passive and fragile status, intoxicated by appearance. Not only feminism, but any serious discourse ends up being swept away by popular culture in Korea.

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.

Mother is a synonym for abandonment and death. Comparing this synonym to water, it is like poured-out water. I call it mother, the identity that I cannot identify.

The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.

How scared God must have been
when the woman who ate all the fruit of the tree he'd planted
was cutting out each red body from
between her legs

The sky, the wound that opens every morning
when a red head is cut out
between the fat red legs of the cloud

(Does that blood live inside me?)
(Do I live inside that blood?)

That woman who walks ahead
That woman who walks and rips
with her scorching body her cold shadow

New-born infants swim
inside that woman's mirror her as white as a snow room
the stickysticky slow breaking waves of blood
like the morning sea filled with fish

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.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

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.