Kim Kwang-rim
Born in Wonsan, South Hamky¢§ong Province, in 1929, Kim Kwang-rim graduated from Kukhak University in 1961 and served as a Professor in Changan Technical College. He became president of the Korean Poets' Association in 1994. After he came down to the South in 1948, he began his literary career with the publication of a poem in the Y¢§onhap Shinmun.
He has published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, including Sangshimhan¢§un ch¢§opmok (Grieving grafted tree, 1959), Hak ¢§ui ch'urak (Fall of a crane, 1971), Kalt¢§ung (Conflict, 1973), ¢§On¢§oro mand¢§un sae (A bird made of words, 1979), Ch'¢§onsang ¢§ui kkot' (Flowers in heaven, 1985). He has also published a number of volumes of critical essays including Chonjae ¢§uie hyangsu (Longing for Being, 1974) and On¢§ur ¢§ui Sihak (Today's Poetics, 1979), as well as volumes of personal essays.
Kim's works have appeared in translation in a number of volumes. He was included in Rainbow in the East, which was published by the same title in Chinese and Japanese in 1989. A volume of his poetry in Japanese has been included in Seizusha's World Poets Series (1995). He is also included in Modern World Poets, a multi-volume series published in Japan in 1998. He was awarded the Korean Poets' Association Prize in 1973 and the Republic of Korea National Literature Award in 1985. He also received the 21th Jikyu award in Japan.
In his early poems, he expresses anguish in the wake of the Korean War, torn between the harshness of social realities and his private awareness of the enduring beauty of nature. His later work sets out resolutely in the direction of an esthetic exploration of existence, where language remains under firm intellectual control and refuses the emotional outpourings of much lyric verse of the time. He is essentially an imagist and his poems often have the quality of rapid sketches in which human sensitivity combines with a strict poetic control. Many critics have commented on his fundamental humanism, his affection for the world and everything in it. He recognizes the power of materialism in modern society, but seems to overcome it by his spirit of tolerance and forgiveness.
The barrenness of a world that wants a desert
A city filled with contamination and pollution
has neither room for sunlight
nor energy to make a sand-fire
It is unable to lead a group of merchants
The back of Orpheus running on a highway is cold
Everything is improvisatory
A circus troupe finished with a show
In the world
that wants a whirling desert
you are seized with a nameless thirst
The tolling bell that gets thirsty because of Sundays
The religion that used to carry faith with him
is just about to drown
Only a soul that leaps from the highest place
can save it
We have to find a man who threw away his flesh
In the middle of the night at a mental hospital
laughter yet to be segregated is coming bursting out
A clock with a broken spring is telling a space
The painter Lee Jungs¢¨ob went to a desert
stark-naked and
had the lower part of his body bitten by the sharp claw of a crab
He displayed the bloody miracle of the bitten innocence in the tinfoil of a
cigarette box
Withdrawing all the money
people say
it's an empty bankbook
and they throw it away
Nevertheless it still has
a number 0 in it
Affirming yet
negating
or neither of them
the empty world still remains
Neither being alive
nor being dead
free even, of such notions
is this quiet emptiness
Nevertheless to withdraw the 0
I go to the bank
yet, no place to collect it in this world
no way to make the bankbook
immaculate
Although I' ve withdrawn everything
a number still remains
it is a world that
can never be deleted
A stake wasn't coming out easily
Broken in half
Tangled up in severed barbed wires
Like a piece of unexhibited sculpture
As a puppy with his hind leg raised
Pissed and ran away
The cough of Malarme was heard
Who vented his anger at the Eiffel Tower
Raindrops were incessantly falling
From the tin roof
Between the rusting barbed wires
Were new leaves sprouting
There's nothing uglier than
The boundary between neighbours
Pain
depends on where it comes from
but pain
coming from no where
is the most horrible.
We always
live measuring pain
The pain of being pricked by thorns
cannot beat the pain of having knees scraped
A bone
tied up by a leather strap and
smashed under the iron wheel
one day
Finally
the man who had his life saved
by having his arm cut
suddenly
started to whine for the pain in his fingers
God
the pain
in a thing that is not
is more horrible
The black colour
that blocks my lust from the very beginning
I share a taxi
with a woman like a penguin
the next stop
a woman colourfully dressed
swelling up like my lust
If you insist on calling the denial of other's
sexual emotion chastity
If you regard snatching other's
sexual belt as unchastity
In one moment I approve of woman's denial of the male sex
In another I disapprove of woman's acceptance of the male sex
Then I get confused
I stagger
at the absurd dilemma that
denial is chastity
acceptance is unchastity
like a reversed line in a poem
Something must have arrived
A sudden
braking
At that moment I lost my balance
I fell upon the two women
After having committed acceptance
after having committed denial
I am exhausted
Women are instinctively sensitive
about their hair and appearance
One steps back from me
the other turns her back