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As a sick kid, I always looked out the window. The objects of my observation were the sun, the seasons, the wind, crazy people, and my grandfather's death. During my long period of observation, I felt that something like poems were filling up my body.

Kim Hyesoon

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Kim Hyesoon
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Poet
Writer
Body
Sick
Grandfather
Long
Looked
Poems
Something
Objects
Observation
Always
Wind
Seasons
Like
Crazy
Period
People
Death
Periods
Felt
Window
Kids
Sun
Filling

More quotes by Kim Hyesoon

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Korean feminism has been swept away by popular culture. It became a sort of old-fashioned trend or a joke.
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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.
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If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
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In Korea, a woman must first obey her father, then her husband when she becomes an ajuma, and finally obey her son as a halmoni. Any woman who violates or lives outside of these roles is called a ch'angyŏ (prostitute).
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When I was at university, the policemen used to measure how short the women's mini-skirts were and how long guys' hair was. We were living under a government that considers people to be soldiers.
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When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.
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When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If you propose there is a feminism problem in Korea, somebody would point out that you are bringing up antiquated issues. No one acknowledges that discrimination against women is still widespread.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Women in Korean myths disappear after giving birth. The reason they were born is to produce sons.
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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.
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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.
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As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.
Kim Hyesoon