Princess Abandoned

by Kim Hyesoon, Don Mee Choi (Translator)

Tinfish’s eleventh Retro Chapbook presents three brief essays by prominent Korean feminist poet, Kim Hyesoon. These essays are about being a woman poet in a patriarchal society. But they are not about the everyday struggles of the poet; instead, they engage issues of femininity and inspiration by way of shaman songs and heroine myths. And so “it becomes possible to explain why the women-poets of South Korea enjoy overlapping the space of the real with the space of illusions.”

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

24 pages, ebook

First published February 1, 2012

About the author

Born in Ulijin, South Korea, Kim Hyesoon (1955-) received her PhD in Korean Literature from Konkuk University, and began as a poet in 1979 with the publication of Poet Smoking a Cigarette. She began to receive critical acclaim in the late 1990s and she attributes this to the strong wave of interest in poetry by woman poets; currently she is one of South Korea’s most important contemporary poets, and she now lives and teaches in Seoul. Her poetry aims to strive for a freedom from form, by experimenting with language focusing on the sensual - often female - body, in direct opposition to male-dominated lyrical poetry. ‘They are direct, deliberately grotesque, theatrical, unsettling, excessive, visceral and somatic. This is feminist surrealism loaded with shifting, playful linguistics that both defile and defy traditional roles for women.’

Having published more than ten poetry collections, a number of these have been translated into English recently: When the Plug Gets Unplugged (2005); Mommy Must be a Fountain of Feathers (2008); All the Garbage of the World, Unite! (2011); Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (2014) and I’m O.K., I’m Pig (2014). Tinfish has also published a small chapbook of three essays entitled Princess Abandoned (2012).

Throughout her career she has gained nearly all of South Korea’s most prestigious literary awards, named after the country’s greatest poets, such as Kim Su-yông Literature Award (1997), the Sowol Poetry Literature Award (2000) and the Midang Literature Award (2006). She was also the first female to win the Daesan Literary Award in 2008.

Reviews

[Víctor Bermúdez · Rating 5 out of 5]

for a poet, inspiration exists as the end (not the beginning) reached by imagination, which is triggered at the very instant the poet makes eye contact with her own existence. That is to say, inspiration is a poet’s clairvoyance of her distant future. Then what was the look of that being the girl momentarily gazed at? What else could it be but the girl’s own death plunging from the rooftop of the building to the hard ground, the absence pujae 부재 opened up?

[Cassie Fleurs]

If you haven't seen the Abandoned ,this chapbook is a bit hard to follow. Her comparing the poet experience to mystical and supernatural phenomena wqs simply not for me. So i didn't enjoy this at all. If you don't enjoy someone talking about writing as this otherworldly thing , i don't think you will enjoy this either