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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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Kim Hyesoon
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Poet
Writer
Water
Synonym
Death
Poured
Mother
Comparing
Cannot
Abandonment
Like
Identify
Compare
Identity
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More quotes by 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.
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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.
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When anger and sorrow overflow, sometimes it becomes poetry.
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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.
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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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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 are foils to men. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance.
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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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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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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 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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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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If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
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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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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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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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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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Korean feminism has been swept away by popular culture. It became a sort of old-fashioned trend or a joke.
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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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