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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
Hair
Policemen
Guy
Skirts
Living
Soldiers
Used
Soldier
Women
Measure
Government
University
Long
Guys
Mini
People
Short
Considers

More quotes by Kim Hyesoon

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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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When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.
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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 anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.
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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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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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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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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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Korean feminism has been swept away by popular culture. It became a sort of old-fashioned trend or a joke.
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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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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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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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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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If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
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The body of poetry is nothing but energy, waves, rhythm.
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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 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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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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