The Flame Returning to the Sun

There was a woman who worshipped the sun. A poet who worshipped not the moon shaded by the sun’s rays, but the sun itself, radiating the most blistering heat and glow. A poet who gave herself to the temple of that sun. That poet is Kim Seung-hee, who announced that she would “never reconcile with realism” (“Siin-ui yeonghon”; The soul of the poet), who grappled fiercely with the reality women face. This poet who “dared to imagine” her “flame on an eternal orbit / returning to the sun / Always, and evermore” (“Taeyang misa”; Mass for the sun) is now already in her seventies. After fifty years of a celebrated career, in which she published eleven volumes of poetry, including her latest astonishing collection Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram (Changbi, 2021; The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon), she still leads the audience to look forward to what might come after this book.

Here, I ponder Kim Seung-hee’s relentless fifty years as a poet, beginning with her debut in 1973. In an era when there weren’t many women poets writing in distinct voices, Kim emerged with her memorable first publication “Geurim sog-ui mul” (The water in the picture), a poem in which she portrays a subject who wishes to paint a life-giving picture. Kim’s first book, Taeyang misa (Goryeoweon, 1979; Mass for the sun) powerfully signaled the birth of a woman poet who worships the sun. I feel tremendous respect for Kim all over again as I grasp that through the eras of “pure poetry” (sunsu si), “participation poetry” (chamyeo si), “national literature” (minjok munhak), realism, minjung literature, labor literature, postmodernism, miraepa poetry and beyond, she has never been swayed by the trends and ideologies of the time but has built and kept her unique place in poetry. Some say poets are destined to lead lonely lives. I can only imagine how much of a solitary struggle Kim’s literary life as the priestess of the sun must have been. I try to picture all the times Kim, a poet so full of love that she wishes to “only / love more, in order to live” (“Taeyang misa”; Mass for the sun), must have written her poems with great intensity, not letting herself slacken even for one moment.

A Spirit Dreaming of Flight

Kim Seung-hee has pursued a boundary-crossing life; yet, she has lived within the institutions of marriage and higher education. On one hand, the fact that she majored in English as an undergraduate and then received a doctorate in Korean literature, or that she moved to the US after finishing her doctoral dissertation, illustrates how she sought to live unrestricted by institutional boundaries; she wanted to cross them. On the other hand, one may also see that Kim committed to a life within institutions: she returned to South Korea to teach at Sogang University, where she worked until the end of her tenure, and attentively fulfilled her position as a wife and mother.

Though Kim’s life as a wife, mother, and university professor depicts her as a diligent denizen, her life as a wild sun-priestess poet suggests that poetic writing was a fierce and lonely struggle for her. Perhaps this is why the reader can sense both heat and coldness in her poetry. Kim is a poet who has the fiery passion for worshipping the sun—all the while knowing that she can turn into ash upon close contact—as well as the ability to sharpen her language with icy reason. It is nothing short of astounding, then, how Kim has simultaneously delivered her roles as a wife and mother, a university professor focused on education and research, and a poet who has continuously reestablished herself. One can only fathom how much Kim must have bitterly interrogated herself.

In her eleventh poetry collection, Danmujiwa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram (The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon), which she published at age seventy, Kim writes that “what dreams also wriggles,” and that one “wriggles because they have a dream” (“Kkumteulgeorida”; Wriggling). While witnessing Kim as she continues to write poems full of wriggling passion and alive with tension, something also wriggled awake within me. Is a sun-worshipping poet born with an uncommon energy? Reading this collection, I found myself already looking forward to her next one.

Kim’s poetry, which forges fiery passion with icy reason, is an incandescent flower that blooms from within pain. The metonymy of the “picked radish” and the “bacon” in this collection must have risen out of her self-evaluation as neither a “kind” nor “truthful” person, as well as experiences as painful as “[her] neck snapping” and as “heavy as [the] truth” of “[p]eople who approach [her] with sincere minds,” all the while also facing those “whose true intentions, or what’s inside them, [she] cannot tell” (Danmuji wa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram; The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon). Her cry, “What more, what more, what more do I want” in this titular poem paradoxically reflects the poet’s refusal to disavow her hope and dreams for people and the world. The poet is aware that if the “wriggling” stops, so will dreams and poetry.

To Live as a Woman Poet

In her debut poem “Geurim sog-ui mul” (The water in the picture), Kim Seung-hee effectively uses the motif of A Dog of Flanders to render a poetic subject who wishes to move beyond painting “that [which] only needs to be beautiful,” to painting a picture that restores life. The poem announces the emergence of a new aesthetic subject who will go to a “lost friend” to “become a river / To permeate,” to turn into “water that will blossom that place” as well as “the friend’s flowers,” then finally rise forth as a “wide, warm ocean / that will blossom our dead pictures.” The poet shows an extraordinary desire to move “beyond Belgium / to far, faraway Asia” (“Geurim sog-ui mul”; The water in the picture).

The literary world must not have been easy on the poet. It was an age and society that were especially conservative and ungenerous toward women poets, and Kim was able to endure only through her poetry. In the poem “Naega eopneun hanguk munhaksa” (Korean literary history without me) from Dalgyal sog-ui saeng (1989; Life inside an egg), Kim demonstrates sharp insight about her identity as a woman poet. Her identity was formed through numerous exclusions from Korean literary history, starting from the “era of zero-meaning pure poetry” to the “era of participation poetry” to the “era of deconstructive poetry (haeche si)” to the “era of commercial love poetry,” and finally to “era of minjung poetry.” By declaring that she is “today a single rat flea / A yeoryu1 rat flea” in front of “Korean literary history / plastered into a pattern like neat wallpaper,” Kim offers a critical view of Korean literary history and powerfully locates her place within it as a woman poet. 

Kim has centered women’s lives throughout her eleven poetry collections. She defines herself as a “daughter of a southern province,” “mixed-blood of poverty and the sun” (“Namdochang”; Southern Province Chang), and identifies with the fierce lives of women poets: Na Hye-seok, who lived the life of a “pioneer” and went out like a “blue flame” (“Na Hye-seok Kompeullekseu”; Na Hye-seok complex), and Sylvia Plath, who left the world by “turning on the gas in the boiler room / in her night clothes” (“Silbia Peulleoseu”; Sylvia Plath). Kim also honors women who were hurt and sacrificed in history, women whose names were taken and existences scrubbed, and women who fled the world consumed by capitalism and neo-liberalism by choosing death. Such women include Joseon-era painter Heo Nanseolheon(1563–1589), who “tried to overcome a hill with a single brush / even during the day, for she would die if she could not overcome herself” (“Nanseolheon-ui bang”; Heo Nanseolheon’s room); the Japanese Imperial Army’s “comfort women”; the woman who survived her son during the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Movement (“Owol Monarija-ui miso”; The smile of Mona Lisa in May); the woman who “howls while tearing open her whole body” in the delivery room (“Yeoin deungsinbul”; Buddhist mummy woman); the woman she witnessed “in the subway station on New York’s Fifth Avenue” who “suddenly started laughing” and threw herself “onto the tracks” (“Sotkuchyeo oreugi 8”; Bursting up 8).

Represented as the pioneering woman, the sacrificial woman, the systematically trapped woman, and the system-fleeing woman, Kim Seung-hee’s poetic subject confronts her own contradictions and dreams of liberating her mind from imprisonment. The desire for flight is often met with failure in reality; in poetry, the poet maintains a firm grip on the “wriggling” sensation. That persistence is what frees her.

Poet of the Earth

In another recent collection, Kim Seung-hee still reveres the sun, but shows a certain change: she presents herself as a heliotropic poet with her feet solidly on the ground. In other words, it seems that Kim has switched from being a priestess of the sun to being a poet of the earth. The poet of the earth consistently reflects the gloom of Seoul, where she resides. The place in Seoul that grabs her attention the most is the Han River. The poet “sets for the banks of the Han River / thinking Maybe I’ll give it a good cry . . .” There, she encounters:

“perished lives, who fell through the broken bridge during the Korean War

All their unspeakable bundles

The junk wristwatch that still rattle-rattles

Impoverished women who, grief-stricken by money and mad for love,

walked into the water singing like Ophelia

People immured in water, meditating in front of a wall with open eyes

Lowly silent lives sitting with their faces in their laps

Spoons rusted with tears.”

The “currents of the Han River” weep on behalf of Kim and, in turn, she mourns “The wordless, who have long been sunken into the water” (“Seoul-ui uul 12”; Gloom of Seoul 12).

Stating that “the person of the avant-garde is who until death / sustains a body full of living butterflies” and “dances forward more and more as rainbow bubbles,” Kim intends to live the life of the avant-garde poet (“Jeonwi-ui saram”; Person of the avant-garde). Even though she wants to “run away and give up,” she cannot surrender hope, because she is unable to let the “brilliant sunlight, which gives and gives” go to “waste”; though she knows “hope is lonely,” she continues to live in hope’s “life sentence” (“Huimangi oeropda 1”; Hope is Lonely 1). Kim cannot desert hope because she is still a poet who worships the sun. The sun has left its mark in Kim’s poetry, but there are transformations within her as a poet who now has her feet cemented on the earth. For instance, the remarkable appearance of “the tomato molar” (“Tomato ssiateul simgoseo”; After planting tomato seeds) in Danmuji wa beikeon-ui jinsilhan saram (The truthful human of pickled radish and bacon)—with its red shade and its round, lumpy shape—is suggestive of both passion and pain, as if it embodyies the sun. This “sun on earth” symbolizes Kim’s poetic metamorphosis.

The poet is keenly aware that to break free from living the “passive form,” in an “unknown fear of / the chased rabbit becoming the chasing rabbit / The chasing rabbit becoming the chased rabbit,” she must “sever the circuit of desire” (“Yumogeul wihayeo 1”; For the nomadic 1). She continues to criticize the neoliberal lifestyle, in which people are inclined to goad one another on. Reading Kim’s poetry, one comes to wonder if today’s society has advanced much from the devasting world in which “war breaks out in the Persian Gulf” and “multinational armies air raid / the streets of Baghdad” in the middle of the night, only to leave behind “a lustrous show / in which the anchorman becomes the hero” (“Naneun syopinghanda goro naneun jonjaehanda”; I shop, therefore I am). Living where “the world of presumption tames the world of no doubt / and the world of no doubt tames our world,” the poet persists in the “heaviest fight in the world” in which she is not tamed by the notions of “presumption” and “no doubt” (“Sesangeseo gajang mugeoun ssaum 2”; The world’s heaviest fight 2). Readers from across the world, watching Kim Seung-hee’s long, tenacious struggle will join their hands with her to start their own fight: “biting down on the tomato molar, / us, together . . .” (“Tomato ssiateul simgoseo”; After planting tomato seeds).



Translated by Emily Jungmin Yoon

[1] Translator’s note: yeoryu means “female,” but in the context of poetry connotes a specific type of femininity that is delicate, gentle, sentimental, etc. The term was criticized and discarded in the late 1990s for its sexist and patriarchal usage.  

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