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Experimental Poet Kim Hye-Sun From South Korea to Read at Smith College
NORTHAMPTON, Mass.
-- Smith College will present
a poetry reading by Kim Hye-sun at 7:30 p.m.
on Tuesday, November
4, in Stoddard Hall Auditorium.
The event is free and open to the public.
Kim
Hye-sun's
poems first appeared in the early
1980s as Korea began to emerge
from decades of authoritarian
rule. In a Korean tradition of
poetry in which women are expected
to be non-controversial, soft-spoken and gentle,
Kim's work is a shocking deviation. Her words are harsh, radical and shouted
from a shifting ground of what Kim calls women's "diasporic identity."
Kim
belongs to the feminist group Another Culture, which emerged in the 1980s
and has
played a critical role in feminist
literary research and publication,
including the development of women's studies in South Korea. She resists
conventional literary forms long defined by men, instead exploring women's
multiple and simultaneous existence as grandmothers, mother, daughters
and lovers, and speaks of the creation of a new language for women --
a language untouched by the powerful
male presences that dominate Korean
literature.
Whereas male Korean
poetry relies on the manipulation
of nature, on what one decides
to see, Kim theorizes that women
recognize nature's independent
existence and understand how to bring forth a poem and let it go its
own way, as they must do with a
child. She speaks in a recent interview of
the forces men impose on their subjects, either by cutting away from
nature only the parts they want,
or by splicing in convenient metaphors. Women
impose their existence not over nature, but beside it, she claims; their
language is internal, and their resistance forges a language that is
surreal, defiant and revolutionary.
Whether
in spite of, or because of, her
rebelliousness, Kim was one of the first women
poets to be
published in the prestigious journal
Literature and Intellect. The recipient
of
several major literary awards in
Korea, she has published seven collections
of poetry and, most recently, a collection
of critical essays about women and writing. Kim's work has been translated
into both German and Spanish, and her poems in English translation have
appeared in the United States in the publications Arts & Letters, Prairie
Schooner and the Literary Review.
Married to playwright
Yi Kang-baek, Kim teaches at Seoul
Arts University, where she is dean
of creative writing.
Kim's visit is
co-sponsored by Smith's Poetry Center, East
Asian Languages and Literatures
department, the East Asian studies
program
and Korean American
Students of Smith, with support from the Korean Literature Translation
Institute. For more information, call Cindy Furtek in the Poetry Center
office at (413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, director, at (413)
585-3368.
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Office of College
Relations
Smith College
Garrison Hall
Northampton, Massachusetts 01063 |
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Marti
Hobbes
News Assistant
T (413) 585-2190
F (413) 585-2174
mhobbes@email.smith.edu
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