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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.

Kim Hyesoon

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Kim Hyesoon
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Poet
Writer
Times
Poems
Woman
Clearly
Death
Poetry
Inside
Remember
Saying
Many
Ways
Relive
Writing
Days
Tomb
Way
Dies
Tombs

More quotes by Kim Hyesoon

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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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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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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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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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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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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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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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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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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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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.
Kim Hyesoon
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The body of poetry is nothing but energy, waves, rhythm.
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.
Kim Hyesoon
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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.
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.
Kim Hyesoon
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When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.
Kim Hyesoon