One Day, Poetry Came to Me
: Prose about Poetry—My Own Poetic History
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Wolran Kim
Mar. 2012


Poetry is a performance by letters. I fell in love with letters in the second grade when I took first place for a handwriting contest at school. Handwriting was an important tool in a “no-computer era,” and winning the contest made me look like the kid with the most beautiful handwriting. I first formed ties with poetry through various poetry contests of the city in which I also won first place. I remember that my poem was titled “A Rainy Day” but I did not keep it. The memory of imagining a rainy alley on a sunny day while watching the dazzling sun shine on the top floor of the city library has clearly remained in my mind. I drew an image of rainbow-colored umbrellas in a narrow, muddy side street, with all the rain drops splashing on the ground just like a sea of beads. I was called the little poet in elementary school, but I was never interested in poetry after that. I just forced myself to write poems for assignments or for writing contests that looked like they were far beyond my abilities. I never knew why people wrote poems because I did not have any interest or passion in it. All the famous poetry was too boring and tedious for me.

I totally forgot that there was such a thing as poetry in this world until I was 41 years old, and one of the reasons was that I came to the United States right after finishing college in Korea. However, one day poetry came to me like it was destiny. Either that or it accidentally popped up through the internet during my mid-life crisis. The internet was such a revolutionary thing to me. I could read anything online and with one short anonymous poem about a sea, I lost sleep for one night. I read that poem at some ordinary website, not even a professional one for poetry, so I cannot find it or remember it now, because I was not interested in poetry at all at that time. I could not sleep because those three or four lines of the poem’s waves sprayed too roughly and intensely in my mind all night. I was depressed with my growing age and the troubles with my kids at the time, and I terribly needed a medium which could raise me from my gloomy swamp and help me escape from that desperate reality. Nothing could save me from my darkness, not even shopping, friends, or my church life. Poetry became a miracle and a mystical experience, showing me that not everything is out of reach in this world.

After that first poem engraved itself into my heart, I wrote one poem that had the same materials and theme as it did. Later, I started to awaken all the memories in my mind that were sleeping in my heart, and I thought that I need to write poems for my tired self, struggling from reality. I went crazy about poetry for the first two years, writing poems every single day as I would a diary. I did not have any space to consider other readers even after I took the platform. I was too busy trying to cool down my own volcanic imagination. I saw myself walking into a mirror while writing my poetry and I become another person watching me. My mindset when I sit down in front of my laptop to write is the same mindset I have when I run to the bathroom to excrete bodily fluids. The pleasure of evacuation is the same pleasure as metabolism of the mystical body which maintains life.

In Plato’s Socrates’ Apology, Socrates met a poet while looking for wise men, and he concluded that the poet is an innate sentimentalist who wrote poetry simply from inspirations without any knowledge or wisdom. I was this poet who is mentioned in Socrates’ Apology. I am often inspired when I am driving on the freeway by myself, with all my memories of my past standing on both sides of the freeway like trees, they rapidly pass by me like the other cars. I went crazy for taking notes wherever thoughts came to me – in the bedroom, bathroom, living room, or kitchen. I was also a cowardly runaway, hiding behind my poetry to try to escape from reality.

Finally, after I ignorantly finished cleaning my heart, I collected my thoughts and started to really wonder about the flow of modern poetry and how other poets write. Was I walking in a disorderly manner? No, I think the desire and passion of writing is much more effective than the theoretical method in my experience. I published my work two times due to being self-intoxicated without any shame, but it was also fortunate for my achievements. Now, I am embarrassed about the mere level of completion, and it is like people who publish their autobiographies without considering their readers’ tastes.
I am now transforming from the poet who met Socrates, who he thought was just a writer of mere gifted passion without intelligence, to a poet who, in Patrick Süskind’s (1949~) view, writes about what they do not know.

I have been caught up expressing my potential memories and emotions, and I think that I should write something beyond the limits of my experience to broaden consensus. That is why I came back to school, and there is a reason why I chose to go to a local school in America, not a cyber-poetry school in Korea. I cannot write poetry as Korean poets do in Korea, because I am an immigrant who is living in a foreign country. I do not want to write as a mime of a Korean poet, but I want to write my own unique poetry as an immigrant in my own environment. For that, I think I need a bigger heart and to experience and embrace the life of others. I am not passionate when I read others’ poetry, and only some that suit my taste are interesting. An unbalanced diet is not good for my health, but it is impossible to read poetry that is not interesting in the midst of an online world flooded with reading. Impressive poetry that contains the truth always excites me apart from the style or tone. Those types of poems make me imitate their format or technical skill, because all good creations come from imitation.

I have published my poetry in a newspaper, The Korean Times of Utah, for the past five years. My readers who read my poetry there react in the exact same way as I do when I read other poets’ works. They complain to me that my poetry is too hard to understand, and this is their weakness because most immigrants don’t read enough. This is why I usually only print simple poems for my readers. Even though I try all different formats—lyric, modern, prose, roughness, sarcasm, popular, esoteric—I often come back to my own style. I made myself used to seeing life with a view of darkness rather than brightness. In the same way, there are dark and bright poets—some call the dark poets Black Poets, and I am a Black Poet because my poetry usually sings of sorrow, tears, and misery rather than joy, laughter and happiness. Readers who have read my two works of poetry describe my collections as the poetry of pain. I made my father the playboy of the century and my mother the unhappiest woman in the world. Those characters are just processed characters made from enhancement, expansion, and exaggerated portraits in a poetic method of my sad memories.

Thus, most of my poems are really dark, moody, sick, and even miserable. The speaker in my poetry is mainly I, and sometimes I am expressed as God, a creator, warrior, or the spokesman of righteousness. These jobs make me really excited. In my “Series of Dog”—one of my favorite poetry series I’ve written and I now have 117 poems—I describe human’s paradoxes, represented by my dog’s eyes. There is no fun in bright and happy poems for me. I want to sing about the breakup rather than love, and tears rather than smiles.

At any rate, poetry is a combination of words. I always use the Internet as a tool for knowledge, antonyms, synonyms, and imagery. For example, if I write about Pangaea, I learn about basic and related knowledge and related words of Pangaea through the Internet, and use them metaphorically in my poetry. The meaning of Pangaea may be combined with life stories. Depending on the subject or theme, full poetry may be expressed metaphorically, or the impressive scene of life is just depicted without any rhetorical tricks. I do not feel sorry or guilty to my readers because I want to be myself, if only while I am writing. I can complete one poem only when poetry forces me to write. Poetry came to me. I didn’t go looking for it, so I always welcome it no matter what kind of face it comes to me with.

I still do not know exactly what poetry is and it becomes even more elusive. It is a matter of course that the unknowing area is getting larger in line with Socrates’ view. Wisdom and intelligence are important tools as much as passion is in poetry. My nicknames as a poet are “Gangster” and “Diarrhea” because my work is raw and I write a lot compared to others. Thus I profess to be a sinner whenever I finish an elaborate piece of work. I often feel as if I am eating my own vomit when I polish my poetry just as a cow ruminates. Who wants to eat their own vomit and continually excrete leftovers with that offensive odor? I am really lazy and stingy in fixing or elaborating on my poems. This poor talent as a poet is a fact that I have to admit, and the reason is because I feel like I’m eating my own vomit again and again whenever I try to reread and fix my own written poems. My poetry has a really disgusting smell and taste to me, and rereading it is the process of suffering to confirm my limitations as a poet, not the process of a good polishing. The reason for being a sinner whenever I publish my work is that I think poets should put all their time and best effort into their works.

I was able to determine my current status as a poet through winning the Literature Award for Overseas Koreans by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of South Korea last year. It did not look real when I received a check for the prize from the San Francisco consulate, and I could finally be less sorry to my adopted poems. Meanwhile, poetry distinguishes the residues of my mind as recycling and waste, and the contents of the recycling bins reenter my heart as poetry. They sometimes appear as a complainant who exposes all my embarrassments, and other times, as a newborn figure that I want to be. Poetry is my cave and place of refuge where I can escape from the bright sunshine of the world. It is also everything that I have lost.

I sometimes have to translate my poetry to English because I live in an English-speaking world. Translation is another creature entirely. In poetry, I need to transfer my mother tongue to a second language exactly according to the level of the simile, metaphor, meaning, sense, effect, and implication of the language. Language is not a simple text, but it is history, culture, and customs. Thus, translated poetry often appears on stage wearing completely different clothes in colors and designs. First, I pick the easiest one when I need a translated poem. I complete each line of verse with the closest original meaning of the words. When I choose a word, sometimes I cannot find the word that I want. (Of course, this is my own problem derived from my weakness of English. And the Google Translate Site creates a third language completely ignoring word order and homonyms.) I match the original line, stanza, and enjambment as well as I can. But I must inevitably ignore the gaps that are clearly revealed from the difference in English and Korean. Also some proper nouns and native names from unique Korean customs and habits need annotations for descriptions.

An aspiring novelist asked a professor how he can write a good novel. The professor answered that he should read all the novels in the world and writes something different from them. My poetry is sometimes highly praised and sometimes harshly attacked. My poetry is just like a child born to me because only I can write them, apart from the literary values and levels. Once, I was really eager to write poetry, sitting in front of my laptop all day long without any interruptions even when I was too busy with a working life. But after my trip to Korea, I could not write poetry at all even while I stayed at home for an entire three months with no schedule. My files fill up only when poetry visits me, and it usually comes when I am busy with my daily life, never in a leisurely way. My impression is that it comes freely with uniqueness when my life is fulfilling rather than when I’m trying to learn how to write through lectures. Poetry is fiction, but a poetical imagination derived from a nonfictional life story has stronger roots for touching.

Poetry brings its own format and body when it comes to me. I feel that poetry writes poems, not me. However, it is only me who can express it in print. Therefore, the best teacher is more writing and more reading. One of my greatest fortunes in my life is poetry because I feel real freedom and happiness when I am writing. How many times has poetry consoled my pains? I was full from poetry without even eating. The origins of a huge event are usually a small and trivial thing. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) said that poetry is a creation of the rhyme, and Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) said that poetry is a criticism of life. Poetry is a song of human beings. If someone seeks solace in my poetry, it is the best result of happiness apart from the literary completion. Poetry is the beginning of all genres, and anyone can be a poet. Doesn’t even the most ordinary day remain in your memory as beautiful poetry when you look back?

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996, said that writing poetry is the same as holding on to a balustrade and waiting to be rescued. I am holding on to that balustrade even though I may never be rescued.