On the Occassion of Poetry Parnassus, London, 2012

To introduce Korean women’s poetry in the space of five minutes would be as difficult as shrinking five thousand years into five minutes. The Korean male literary establishment differentiates and categorizes poetry that women write as “Women’s Poetry.” However, I think that Korean women’s poetry is now engaged in “doing” poetry more than ever before. (“Doing” poetry is a term I have coined to express that women “live” and “do” poetry rather than write poetry, “performing” inside and outside of poetry.)

A bear called Ung-nyô appears in the Korean creation myth called Tang-gun. In order to become human, the bear carries out the mission of living on only mugwort and garlic for one hundred days inside a cave. The tiger is unable to last one hundred days, but the bear is able to endure it. The bear becomes human and marries a god’s son who descends from the sky and gives birth to a son. Then she disappears from the myth. In Korean mythology, women disappear after they give birth to sons. They never appear again. The ultimate goal of their existence is to give birth to sons.

However, there is one myth in which women do not disappear. This myth is about an ancestral shaman. It is a story called The Abandoned. A daughter is abandoned because she was born as a girl, the seventh in a row; she goes on a journey to the realm of the dead and returns to become the first shaman, a shaman whose duty is guiding the souls of the dead to a good place in the heavenly realm. In this myth a woman does not disappear after giving birth to a son. I have interpreted this narrative’s symbolic meanings and researched the characteristics of poetry. In Korean culture, there exists only one area where men assume a subordinate position to women and that is at a shaman’s ritual. At the ritual, the female shaman is the lead protagonist while the men merely accompany the shaman by playing instruments and doing chores such as carrying loads to set up the ritual. Perhaps this is because, at the ritual The Abandoned, the myth must be recited. And the women may play a bigger role because in the shamanic realm the emphasis is on performing songs and dances and being possessed by spirits.

Korean poetry has always existed in two tiers. One was metered poetry with matching numbers of syllables written by aristocratic men and the other kind was women’s songs. The poems by the aristocrats were written in classical Chinese, and the men who excelled in writing poetry in the civil servant examination administered by the palace were granted a position as scholar-officials. However, women composed poems based on their daily existence, love, grief endured under their in-laws, poverty, labor, along with fantasies that arose due to oppression. These poems were sung and orally transmitted, and it was not until the 20th century that they were documented in books. The only poems by aristocratic men that I find interesting are the ones written in exile by men expelled from their government positions by the king. Their poems were written very much from a feminine position with a feminine voice. I prefer the “voice of the expelled” in poetry by the expelled men who have been removed from power rather than poetry written by those in power.

Then those two tiers of poetry, the classical and the oral, overlapped as one. The new genre emerged as modern poetry from the 1900s. This poetry that destroyed meter was called “free verse” at the time. If you take a survey of Koreans’ most beloved poets, the two poets that still appear at the top of the list are Kim So-wol and Han Yong-un, the poets of the 1900s. What is distinctive about their poetry is that they have chosen a female persona as their poetic persona and sing the pain of farewells in a woman’s voice. This is no different from in the pre- modern period when the royal subjects sang their desire for higher government positions in a woman’s voice to the king. In this woman’s voice, Kim and Han expressed their grief over the injustice of the colonization of Korea by Japan. Their poems were also very similar to the voices of the unlearned, illiterate women of the pre-modern era.

As I began writing poetry, I often felt as if my tongue were paralyzed. I had no role model for poetry. The woman’s voice made by Korean men, the voice that is even more feminine than a woman’s, was not mine. I had no role model, especially because even pre-modern women’s poetry only consisted of songs of love, farewell, and longing for the other. Even now, although not explicitly visible, many of the same aspects of the pre-modern era are still present in the poetry written by Korean men. This involves a one-to-one interaction between the subject of the poem and the poet, and from such a perspective the poet appropriates the subject as his own and creates a poem. Therefore, I thought to myself that I needed to reinvent my mother tongue. I decided to explore in my own voice the possibilities of the sensory; I decided to believe in my own feminine individuation, its secrets. For me the vast open field of the unknown and the prison existed simultaneously. Today, the young Korean women poets are developing a terrain of poetry that is combative, visceral, subversive, inventive, and ontologically feminine.

— Kim Hyesoon
Previously presented at Poetry Parnassus, London June 2012