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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.

Kim Hyesoon

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Kim Hyesoon
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Poet
Writer
Short
Considers
People
Hair
Policemen
Guy
Skirts
Living
Soldiers
Used
Soldier
Measure
Women
University
Government
Guys
Mini
Long

More quotes by Kim Hyesoon

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Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.
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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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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.
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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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Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.
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Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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The body of poetry is nothing but energy, waves, rhythm.
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When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.
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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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Women in Korean myths disappear after giving birth. The reason they were born is to produce sons.
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If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
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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.
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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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Women are foils to men. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance.
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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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