Reading Kim Ki-Taek’s Poetry

January 8th, 2009 by Jennifer Kwon Dobbs | Posted in Blog |

I’m looking forward to co-hosting Kim Ki-Taek with the University of Minnesota’s Consortium for the Study of the Asias this coming February. He’s reading at the UM, Loft Literary Center, and St. Olaf College during February 23-27. Lee Herrick introduced Kim’s work to me a year ago after meeting him in California. (Kim Ki-Taek was a writer-in-residence at UC Berkeley before.) So it’s a pleasure to share his work with the Twin Cities!

Kim Ki-Taek was born in 1957 at Anyang, the southern satellite city of Seoul. He majored in English language and literature in college and Korean language and literature in graduate school. He started to write poetry after winning the poetry section of a literary contest in Hankook Daily Newspaper in 1989 (32 years old). He has published 4 books of collected poems - Fatal Sleep (1991), Storm in the Hole of the Needle (1994), Office worker (1999), Cow (2005) and has won 5 major literary awards - Kim Soo Young Literary Award, Hyundai Literary Award, Midang Literary Award, Jihoon Literary Award and Isu Literary Award.

In his poetry, he has focused on the human physicality and the relationship between the body and the violence inflicted upon it and the idea that physical and psychological violence inflicted on human body leaves its mark behind. The mark eventually manifests itself as various habits that continue to inform one’s sense of itself. He has tried to observe this process and record it in his poems. His works were often told to get the poetic characteristics by several critics “the perspective imagination” or “observation and description of minute and microscopic details.”