Kim Hyesoon Surreal-Absurd Sampler

We feel very lucky to have a selection of poems from South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon to share with you in Surreal-Absurd today. These poems are from I’m Ok, I’m Pig!, her 2014 Bloodaxe collection, translated by Don Mee Choi. Here is an extract from an interview, which can be found in full at the back of the book, followed by the poems:

Translated by Don Mee Choi

Poetry or Letter To the Other of My Inside-Outside:

An Interview with Kim Hyesoon from list_Books from Korea (Winter, 2013).

By Shin Hyông-ch’ôl. Shin is a South Korean literary critic.

Shin: Much of Korea’s poetry is neatly written, depicting everyday experience along with an adequate message, yet your poetic texts provide inspiration to critics who are trying to theorize the role imagination plays in poetry. In your poetry there is fairy-tale-like imagination, grotesque imagination, mythical imagination and so forth; in fact, there are multiple imaginations at play.

Kim: When I began writing in my twenties, I just wrote down any “poetic” thing that soared up in me. I wasn’t conscious of what I was writing or why I was writing it. Back then I didn’t even have friends or teachers. Meanwhile my imagination developed like the muscles of someone who exercises. Imagination is the process of moving muscle in sync with bone, to a place of freedom, poetry’s vast outer side. It activates something to nothing. Perhaps I should say it’s a cloud mill? The place where cloud(poetry) knows but poet(me) doesn’t know. With bone and muscle, I repeatedly call someone who disappears into the slippery crack of time and space, someone who becomes more unfamiliar and mysterious by the day. Lately I’ve been thinking that someone laid up in an intensive care unit, or “me” the woman, a few seconds before death, is dreaming for real “now, here, me.” You could say it feels like the observed and the observer, before they perish, are trying to move something together, inflating the muscle of the ignition point.  

Kim Hyesoon is born in South Korea. She received her PH.D. in Korean Literature from Konkuk University. Beginning as a poet in 1979 with the publication of Poet Smoking a Cigarette and four other poems in Literature and Intellect, She has published 13 poetry collections include: From Another Star (1981), Father’s Scarecrow (1984), The Hell of a Certain Star (1987), Our Negative Picture (1991), My Upanishad, Seoul (1994), Poor Love Machine (1997), To the Calendar Factory Supervisor (2000), A Glass of Red Mirror (2004), Your First (2008), and Sorrowtoothpaste, Mirrorcream (2011), Blossom, Pig (2016), The Autobiography of Death (2016), Phantom Pain of wings(2019). , She has published Essays include To Write as a Woman: Lover, Patient, Poet, and You (2002), Thus Spoke No (2016), Women, I Do Poetry (2017), Do Womananimalasia ( 2019).  Her collections that are translated in English include: Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers (2008), All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011) Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014), I'm O.K, I'm Pig (2014), Poor love machine (2016), Autobiography of Death (2018)) A Drink of red mirror (2019) Cicada Literary Award (2021, Sweden). Her anthologies were also translated in French, German, Swedish, Danish and Japanese languages. She has received multiple literary prizes including Kim Su-Yong Literary Award (1997), Sowol Poetry Literature Award (2000) and Midang Literature Award (2006). Daesan Poetry Award (2008), Lee Hyoung-Gi Literary Award (2019) Griffin Poetry Prize (2019) Cicada Literary Award(2021, Sweden). She lives in Seoul and she is honorary professor of Seoul Institute of Arts.