Similarly, how has women’s poetry figured into the larger tradition of Korean poetry?

Kim Seung-Hee
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

In former times, female poets assumed their roles and status in traditional society and sang about subjects generally of a female nature such as the loss of love, sentimental sorrow and the beauty of nature, etc. However, in the 1980s, Korean women awoke to feminism and female poets took an interest in social issues such as democratization and human rights. They raised the issue of gender in a society that was still embedded in the patriarchal system and wrote poems of social criticism about gender inequality, female sexuality, etc. If we are allowed to categorize the poems that women wrote as feminist poetry, these poems in a way brought a certain change to traditional women’s poetry. However, they also served as a reformatory stimulus in Korean society as a whole. In fact, there was a concomitant development of democratization, feminism, and the labor movement in Korea. The poet Ko Jung-hee was a very influential feminist writer in this regard.

How do you see your poetry as responding to or departing from the traditions of Korean poetry in general, and Korean women’s poetry, in particular?

My poems are unique because they are different from traditional Korean poems and also from feminine poems. When my first poems were published, in the period when Populism prevailed in the Korean literary scene, they were badly received. I depicted the self’s grotesque inner reality with a Modernist perspective, so my poems were stigmatized as escapism, pieces full of Occidentalism, and the voice was labeled as one of surrealistic autism. As such, they were hardly recognized in poetry circles.

Rather, a poet is one who gazes at the landscape of our lives. If poets can get at a certain idea or ideology behind this landscape, poems can have a deeper meaning.

But after I got married and became a mother, my experiences as a woman developed. At the same time, my poems started to touch upon reality more concretely, as I tried to express my experiences as a woman. For example, “The Female Buddha” ( 여인등신불) is about giving birth, “Institution” (제도) is on parenthood,” A Love Song for Belly Button” (배꼽을 위한 연가) is on relations between mother and daughter, “Man-pa-sik-jeok” (만파식적) is on marital relations, etc. These real life scenes pervaded my poems which in turn enabled them to obtain universality. This universal empathy brought me a certain recognition from the poetry community.

Women writers who were awakened to feminism in the 1980’s resemble one another, but at the same time they are different. People who highlight elements of Modernism in my poems call me the mother of futurist writers, yet on the other hand those who see more of the feminine features in my work address me as a guerrilla feminist.

One of the elements of your work that most strongly draws me to it is the way the speaker in your poems displays a deep social consciousness. For me, your poems work like acts of witness. They highlight suffering that might otherwise be overlooked, encouraging the reader to consider their complicity in the social forces that have produced this suffering. Why is it important for you to perform this kind of witnessing in your poetry?

This is because poetry inevitably speaks of the time and place where we live. Human beings are to exist in the time and place where they’re assigned. We are destined to witness and testify to what happens in the world we are thrown into. I don’t argue particularly that poetry should be a testimony about our society. Rather, a poet is one who gazes at the landscape of our lives. If poets can get at a certain idea or ideology behind this landscape, poems can have a deeper meaning. Quite frequently, the injury and pain that we suffer are caused by social forces rather than by individual destiny. I’d like my poetry to portray the fact that individual injury and pain are both social and political, though it is neither with the camera angle nor with the linguistic technique of realism that my poetic self witnesses.