Yoon Sik Kim was born in South Korea and served as an officer in the Republic of Korea Air Force for five years before he came to America. He earned his Master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma and his Ph. D. from Oklahoma State University, specializing in Ezra Pound and Modern Poetry. Having taught for more than 30 years at the college level, he now teaches part-time while sharpening the blade of his word-smithing. His debut collection of poetry, Broken Mirrors, was published by New York Quarterly Books in November 2012. His poetry has been published in many literary journals including: Green Mountain Review, Chants, Midland Review, Pleaides, Black Bough, Voices International, Rhino, and mostly The New York Quarterly. Married to an Okie, he homesteads in the outback of Oklahoma, where he lives with his wife, children, horses, and honeybees on a farm.
The following three poems are from, Broken Mirrors.
THE FOG OF WAR
in the shades of the night
palm trees play a practical joke concealing
squadrons of black bats hanging upside
down in the caves of igloos
iron jaws of armors
insignificant like a toy
abandoned by a Bedouin child
breathe the serene balmy desert air
dressed to kill for the night
they take off one by one
hiding their hideous intentions
under the wicked radar-thin black-gossamer nightgown
you only hear their lean moaning as they come
just before they touch off fireballs
the pent-up anger that tumbleweeds across
the lone desert fields
no one knows for sure where the fireball landed
aided by the high-tech scalpel they often hit decoys
the silhouettes of fighter jets in the moonlight
those cubistic renditions of war gears on cement
in two dimensions their shadows dazzle the concrete
runway beyond the grasp of Image Intensifier
the night goggle every tadpole in the pond wears
to grab the tail of the living shadow
in the dark nobody knows the real figures
the damage the silhouette enemy aircraft endures
they fly above the wavelength beyond our touch
basking under and
above the ultraviolet electromagnetic spectrum
the rainbow of our perception
the truth of natural deception
that wars in the mind of the living dead
the desert sand leaves no signatures
the dunes dance beneath the wavelength of our reach
invisible like the copperhead sand viper
that hides the truth among the grains of doubt
A POET
There lives a bristlecone con pine,
upon a desert, out of nowhere.
An old nut, full of knotty sores,
he is an asymmetrical screw.
Twisted by wrenching turns, warped,
buckled, and rickety with gnarls.
Bowlegged and knock-kneed and
pigeon-toed, the dwarf hangs on.
A natural bonsai in a drying tea pot,
he tries hard to grow. Inward.
An inch in a hundred years, a ring
at a time, in everlasting drought.
All unto himself, he is a miniature
universe. An ever-grin, tooth and nail.
There goes the nut. Mostly talking
to himself, on the edge of insanity.
Grown accustomed to blasting sands,
scorching winds, and wintry droughts.
He’d shut down everything else to
nurture his soul on a single strand of life.
Hidden deep inside the thicken bark,
mutilated, askew, like a contortionist.
There he congeals a drop of water,
molecule by molecule, like a
hunchbacked monk, counting
millennia, crumb by crumb.
A TORRENTIAL RAIN
A supercell devours the sun.
A dim dime asphyxiated in the gut,
gobbled up by the evil smoke, closing in
fast at the throat of heaven.
A monstrous black catfish in the sky,
drooping-heavy, pregnant with
burdens, of millions,
of unhatched eggs.
The cell-burst, tearing the gut
open. A soaking onrush of eggs,
pelting on the tin-top of cars,
stranded fish, on land,
swimming in the puddles
of mud.
TTQ – You were born in South Korea and served as an officer in the Republic of Korea Air Force for five years before coming to America. What made you decide to attend the University of Oklahoma and earn your Master's and how comfortable was that transition for you?
Yoon Sik Kim – First of all, Darryl, and readers of this page, thank you very much for this wonderful interview opportunity as it is my first one ever. Frankly, I did not know people would care about poetry, in general and my meager work Broken Mirrors, in particular. I truly am grateful.
Military service was an obligation, then and now, for all eligible Korean men (now some women volunteers, I believe), especially if you want to go abroad, a prerequisite: you could not go abroad without fulfilling the patriotic duty (as in the old lie: “Dulce et decorum est pro partira morti”). I worked as Program Management Officer at TACC (Tactical Air Control Center), a giant military complex, a joint facility between USAF and ROKAF, where they said I was the best English-speaking Korean officer, serving both countries as a go-between.
There the University of Oklahoma was one of the two schools that had established a branch as a part of their Advanced Programs Overseas for servicemen. The ubiquitous University of Maryland was another. They did not offer any courses in the Humanities, however. So I enrolled in their masters program in Human Relations—to largely work on my English—while dreaming that someday I would be going back to English Literature, my undergraduate major. (I already knew that one could not support a family by being a writer alone; hence, I needed a Ph.D. for a bread-earning gig.) When I was honorably discharged, I simply switched the campus from the branch campus to the Norman, Oklahoma campus. My friends in USAF had warned me not to go to Oklahoma; rather, they urged me to try either east coast or west coast, instead. They had been wise and I should have listened to their warnings.
But I did not know any better. In my naiveté, I thought Oklahoma would be just OK, being in America and all, unaware of cultural nuances now I am aware of, often associated with idiosyncratic peculiarities of this red-clay region: “Oklahoma” ironically means literally “Red People.” Growing up in Korea, for example, the notion of being a minority had never occurred to me as all the Koreans look pretty much alike; however, my transition to America has taught me that I was supposed to be a “minority,” forcing me to “behave” accordingly.
Contrary to my idealistic view of America I had formed while in Korea, the real shock was this discovery—that this was a great nation bound by a tiny binary code, a vast land of unequal opportunity: black and white, heaven and hell, and us and them, etc. For instance, no self-respecting white man would tolerate, often overtly or covertly, my being either smarter or cleaner looking than most of them, as I have learned to discern this subtle prejudice intuitively: many took such sign as an ontological threat, in fact. To wit, a white man could marry a woman of any other race although, for example, a native Indian man could never go near a white woman for ages as he was “an inferior savage.” Yup, that was in the books.
However, I cherished the fact that I was better than an everyday Joe in many respects, especially in academic settings, monkeying in my second language, when I competed with white students while working in graduate programs. After all I graduated summa cum laude in Korea and was the only one of the 300 Air Force officer cadets chosen in the entire country: I was the only one from my university who has passed the officer’s exam.
Although I swept, mopped, and waxed the classrooms all night, I learned not to pay attention to small matters in life, however. Rather, I decided to focus on my writing, instead, the real reason why I came to America. I had zero social life, I got up around 4:00 in the morning every morning, busy blacksmithing words, I went to school during the day, and then I went to work at night to clean classrooms. The only venue for me to de-stress was playing competitive USTA-sanctioned tennis tournaments as I was a decent player.
TTQ – When did you first decide to start writing poetry and how much of an influence has Pound been on you?
Yoon Sik Kim – When I was in the third grade, I vividly remember being in an essay contest while growing up in South Korea. That day was Teachers’ Day, a national holiday in Korea; therefore, the theme of the essay was about the importance of teachers and the all-consuming education. (Korean mothers are American soccer Moms on steroid when it comes to education.) Sprawled on the cold dilapidated porous wooden floor, for we did not have enough chairs to go around in the village school, I wrote my barely legible Korean, chicken paws scratched on a piece of paper—biting the broken butt of the lead pencil, trying to remember adult conversations I heard, in general, and their idiomatic expressions, in particular, for their use of language had already started to catch my young fancy. Although I was wet-behind-the ears and snot-green, I often enjoyed memorizing certain expressions, for the sheer power of words had begun to enthrall my growing imagination: the sonic beauty and musicality of the rhythm, for example. When I dashed off the essay, first among the students, I turned it in. The teacher, for having little to do while proctoring the contest, glanced at my essay with a wry grin, recognizing a few clever turns of phrases in my expression. Then to my utter shock, he decided to read it aloud in front of the whole class. I felt my heart palpitate in my mouth, for I was a big-time third grader, who revered my teacher like God. And they do that in Korea.
No. I did not win the contest: I was not even close. But his reading of my essay in front of the whole class impacted me like a bomb. That day my universe changed: the humble teacher helped me discover my life, my vocation, unawares. From that day on, I wanted to become a writer. Nothing more, nothing less. That was many decades ago in a nameless village in Korea. That humble teacher in my village school, a thatched roof drowned among rice paddies, is responsible for my majoring in English, for Korean alone was not good enough for my ambition. That teacher is responsible for my traveling, while in college, hundreds of miles to meet W. H. Auden, in person at Seoul National University around 1977 (Incidentally I too asked him if there was any “hope” in contemporary poetry, the universal conundrum among serious writers anywhere.) That teacher is responsible for my Ph.D. in English. That teacher is responsible for my numerous publications in The New York Quarterly, among others. And that teacher is still responsible for my first collection of poems. That teacher discovered my raison d’être—the what-essence of what I am.
As Pound has done wonders to many a great poet in Modernism Era, especially to T. S. Eliot, his impact on me was immeasurable and invaluable. I recognized a parallel universe the master craftsman had gone through before my time. Like Pound’s earlier journey to Italy to become the world’s greatest poet, I too came a-beached in American shore to become the best English poet Korea has ever produced. Like Pound, my every breath was spent in the temple of language while blacksmithing words, hammering iron ores to transform them into blades of steel—“Le mot juste” in strict Hemingwayan sense. Like Pound, I yearn for precision (economy), clarity, concision, natural rhythm, and luminosity (imagistic “at-one-ment”) by excising and scalping the cholesterol and fat in language. He served me as my guiding star. Nobody has influenced me more than this irascible old monk: he was one of the rare Western minds that even grasped the workings of Chinese ideograms, for example, let alone his exceptional ear for various European tongues, especially Greek. Like him, I am an expat, too. In fact, my Ph. D. dissertation deals with his Pisan Cantos, which he has composed as if he had used English language like Chinese ideograms through his careful line breaks and strange visual layout.
I am interested in global poetics, finding common denominators of poetry writing across the world; in 1996, for example, I traveled to Morocco and Tunisia on a Fulbright scholarship to learn about Arabian poetry, as well. My multicultural and interdisciplinary dissertation on Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (pp.343) probes the important interdisciplinary paradigm-shift that occurred at the dawn of the twentieth century: cultural, scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, aesthetic, and theoretical contexts of Modernism. It specifically examines the crucial confluence which Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (Fourth Dimension Time), Modern Visual Arts (Cubism and Futurism), Modern Poetry (Imagism and Vorticism), and the workings of Chinese Ideograms, respectively, play in the makings of Modernism. My current research interest lies in publishing one of the chapters of my dissertation in which I postulate common denominators found in global poetics: Aristotle’s Poetics, Anglo-Saxon’s kenning, Johnson’s Metaphysical Conceit, Coleridge’s Fancy and Imagination, Pound’s Vorticism, Eliot’s Impersonality aesthetics, and the operation of Chinese Ideograms. This particular chapter was accepted for publication by Dr. Carroll Terrell, the preeminent Pound scholar (University of Maine) who had served as my chief dissertation advisor.
TTQ – How would you best describe the poems in your first full-length collection Broken Mirrors (NYQ Books, 2013) and is there a particular message you hope your readers will extract from the book?
Yoon Sik Kim – I would like to describe them as strings of rare translucent pearls, congealed and coagulated, in the gut-essence of my existence in America; as William Carlos Williams has once put it, the poet (the oyster) has found this foreign object in his guts, this sharp painful “otherness” which he cannot get rid of. Yet to survive, the oyster has to cover this grit caught inside his flesh with a shiny and smooth coating so that he too can coexist with this foreign object that would otherwise kill him. You “bleed” this coating because you cannot help it.
It’s a matter of breathing and not breathing.
If there is any message in my poems, it will be rather straightforward and obvious as I sometimes indulge in writing sociopolitical issues, often disgusted and fed up: they are my spit. However, I prefer the beauty of the lyrics, in and of themselves, rather than having some didactic “message,” as such. Perhaps this preference for pure lyric is in the tradition of Li Po. I want my readers to simply enjoy the lyrics as whatever they are to them, including messages they might glean themselves. I love the process of composing them, and if someone finds my works enjoyable, that would be more than what I could ask for.
TTQ – I’m curious as to what your writing process is like and what works best for you. Do you write your poems in Korean first and then translate them into English?
Yoon Sik Kim – Usually I am hit by a “primary pigment,” the key image, line, thoughts, epiphany, or sudden realization. Next, as I contemplate on the idea, lines come into my head, ex nihilo. These lines could be either the opening lines or the last lines in the last stanza. When young, I would compose great poems in my dreams, and sometimes I would even comment on them while dreaming. Then when I woke up, I would lose everything. To prevent this, I used to keep a note pad handy, especially around my bed. But as my writing matured, I learned that I did not have to write down anything when I am arrested by an inspiration because if the idea was powerful or important enough, I knew it would come back to me again. So nowadays it gets registered in my hard drive—somewhere in my brain for quick retrieval at my leisure.
Next, I start working on these lines on my laptop. I am now in the thick of the process. I usually get up early around 4:00 in the morning, and then work on my poems for two to three hours straight, going through dozens of revisions. Writing, for me, is largely rewriting once you are done with your first draft. Invariably I will revise my work around thirty times or more, and then I give it a rest for a couple of days before I revisit for further revision. Right before submission to a publisher, I would look at it one last time. By then there is very little to edit or revise other than refining to finish it. Throughout this entire process, I search for “le mot juste”: sometimes I could sit in front of my laptop all day, wanting to find that exact word, like a mentally-challenged person morbidly obsessed with watching ants or grass grow. Being a writer, I know, is a pathological condition, a manic depression in your heart; you could go out and do other activities like normal people would, but you would rather find that exact word because not doing so will bug you to death. In this narrow sense, I am a perfectionist. Yes, I know I am one sick mental case. But that’s in my DNA.
Engrossed with the English language, I even dreamed in English while living in Korea. I think and write in English, period. Besides, my Korean has lost, I think, its currency by now, which helped me to absorb English better. Like Eliot, the British subject born in St. Louis—I too have often felt that I am an American citizen born in Korea. Translation, for me, is an inexact rendition of the original, not to mention the painful fact that language itself is an inexact approximation as a metaphor. The signifier cannot ever be the signified, ever. In fact, I prefer the originals to a translation.
Most of my poems (say, 95%) visit me a la Li Po, who described his inspiration as a meteorite striking the night sky out of the dark; when I am hit, I feel dumbfounded, for it happens so unexpectedly, out of the blue. However, I also visit poems; in fact, some of my good poems are results of this process that Pound dubs as cogitatio [hell], meditatio [purgatory], and contemplatio [paradise]. Please forgive my snobbery. Pound elaborates this process thus: “There are three modes of thoughts, cogitation, meditation, and contemplation. In the first the mind flits aimlessly about the object [Hell], in the second it circles about in a methodical manner [Purgatory], in the third it is unified with the object [Paradise] . . . .” That is precisely what is going on with me when I am in the thick of it all. Below is the source:
TTQ – What has your relationship been like with the folks at NYQ Books and to what degree have you been promoting Broken Mirrors? Have you been doing many readings and what's the audience reaction been like?
Yoon Sik Kim – I have been largely loyal to NYQ for all my life; I have known Bill Packard for decades. When he accepted my first poem a while back, whose title was in Chinese (Poet), it took a long time for him to figure out how to print that Chinese title. Eventually he had to photocopy my brushstroke as it appeared in my original submission. Anxious to see my first work in print, however, I wrote him a letter addressing him as “Dear Almighty Editor,” bugging him why he has not yet printed my good poem. He sent me a post card explaining the difficulty of rendering the Chinese title on to NYQ, and signed off the card “the Almighty Editor!” I have saved this postcard to this day.
I owe my first book publication to Raymond Hammond, the current editor of NYQ who graciously approached me to help publish my first book ever; I had thought that my works will never see the daylight and was ready to take them to my grave although I came to America to be a writer, a “butting” (sic) poet if you will. I have simply refused to publish my work out of my own pocket, a kiss of death in my circle, for I knew if I am good enough, someone will eventually notice my hard work and dedication someday. I have refused to be called a “poet” out of my own pocket; I wish I had that kind of money. There are already too many “poets,” At the same time, I was not afraid to take my work to my grave because whether someone reads my work or not, I will be writing poems for my own existence.
Of course, I would like the opportunities to read and promote Broken Mirrors; however, I really have not been able to do so other than telling my students about it in my classes I teach. I live in the “outback” of Oklahoma; as a result, I do not have a cosmopolitan audience, not to mention the fact that some of my local readership might find my ethos and aesthetic sensibility disagreeable. (In fact, nobody knows I have published my first book other than my immediate family.) Not that I care. If any of your readers would like to invite me to read Broken Mirrors and other poems, I would love that opportunity, and that will be yet another first. (Hey, I have never been to Canada! Did you know Canada produces more honey than America?)
TTQ – What are your thoughts on the current situation in North Korea and should the rest of the world take their threats seriously or not? Is it strictly gamesmanship? Do you write a lot about the politics of North and South Korea?
Yoon Sik Kim – While in the Air Force, I served as Weapons Controller as well, the radar guy that helps our fighter jets to position behind the Migs so our guys can shoot them down: “Check six (o’clock) and kill Migs.” They are, I believe, good at brinkmanship, playing a dangerous chess game as they have been after the Armistice Treaty. Why? They’ve got nothing and the world listens and react! It costs nothing to bluff. They are masters of bluffing. The more reactions we show to their antics, the more they will rattle their sabers. Ignore the bully.
Their antics remind me of an adult who suffers a severe form of International Attention Deficit Syndrome. Let the brat holler and carry on. Who cares? They can hardly feed their own people, yet they want to start a war? Good luck. To start a war, you must have stockpiles of provision in all sectors. Remember, the army cannot march on empty stomach, indeed. This invasion scenario is highly unlikely because they themselves know if and when they do that, North Korea will be wiped clean out of the world map, once and for all. Good riddance.
We are still suffering from the failed US foreign policy of the 50’s: MacArthur should have been allowed to finish his military mission. Communism or democracy does not matter to a Korean family because these ideas come and go; what remains is the cold fact that blood is thicker than some abstract construct. For example, would you abandon your child because he/she is a nonconformist to your family value or tradition? Koreans should be reunited, once and for all. For example, whether one is Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Muslim, Buddhist, or Taoist is not as important as we all are Americans. Whether you are an American, a Canadian, or a Korean is not as important as we are all human beings; we all suffer even without these abstract construct. Even animals would recognize the importance of a family. Why can’t we?
TTQ – What is your opinion on the current state of poetry in America?
Yoon Sik Kim – America is awash with consumer poetry in my view, a Walmart fart for a quick consumption only to be abandoned in nanosecond as it becomes stale quickly. I suppose I am glad these poems have found their places, nevertheless. The Hallmark Card industry can consume tons of them. In the town where I live, for example, high school students publish their “poems” every Sunday to the delight of their grandparents’ gossip (a discovery of new literary protégée), mostly an exercise of metrical box-stuffing, the teenager kind. They are dime a dozen. This consumer poetry, in my view, is neither bad nor good, the kind you, as the editor, have seen million times, and the kind of artsy fartsy factory-cute poems you would love to take to your outhouse.
Obviously, this is a judgment call based on personal value. Being a classicist, of sort, I have a rather simple yard stick to measure a poem: do I want to re-read this poem in the future, and when I re-read this, will it still retain its original pang, the bang of luminosity that has once transported me with its sublime uplifting? A good poem should. Now ask ourselves: how often do we experience such enthrallment while reading today’s submissions? Not very often.
In general, there is and always will be a good deal of consumer arts across the genre; for example, when you go to a concert, you can see the performers on the stage deep in trance, mesmerized by their own music and performance, while the audience is bored to tears by their loud noise-making antics, a disconnect between the artist and the audience. Such disconnect can happen even in classical arts; for example, I am thinking about Finnegan’s’ Wake and even The Waste Land. If you are not an academic in English graduate programs, you will find these works unapproachable. How come the footnotes of such works are longer than the works themselves? A situation that reminds me of a Korean saying: the bellybutton is bigger than the belly!
A similar phenomenon of disconnect happens in the visual arts as well; if someone paints an abstract painting right off the bat, without having gone through a solid training in the fundamentals of drawing, I find that sense of divorcement as the painting fails to talk to me. I would like to ask the artist, “Can you draw a horse?” I doubt if this person can. Nowadays, one can be a Rap “artist” while being tone-deaf, too. What kind of “musician” is that? Similarly writing free verse is the same thing as Frost has once said: playing tennis with the net down.” Anything goes as “art.” People have exploited the iambic pentameter and regular rhyming to death, yet free verse still plays against the old rhythm in the backdrop just as a good jazz musician can echo against a classical piece in the background.
A large portion of MFA Creative Writing programs in America is a part of this money-making scheme. Can you imagine Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, Milton, Eliot, Pound, etc. sitting in “Dr. Kim’s Creative Writing Class in Poetry,” picking their nose, trying to emulate Dr. Kim’s freak’n style? What a joke! But what a great way of making a living if you are the teacher! Sure, if you are the teacher, you would preach how these wondrous programs work—to “maimtame (sic)” the status quo. Great works of art are NOT democratic; they are INDIVIDUAL. In fact, few MFA programs have spawned any recognizable names by international standards, but they have been serving the consumerism of creative writing, largely to maintain the market by its graduates to repeat the cycle. Workshops and retreats deemphasize this individualistic, one-on-one, soul-searing effort, as if great wring comes from a democratic process of collaboration, this artsy fartsy group gossip. Why not ask a “committee” to compose a poem?
If you are truly committed to the craft of writing, ignore all this: you do not need to waste money, the money that subsidizes only a dubious coterie of “academic poets” whose names nobody recognizes: the word “academic poet,” in fact, is an oxymoron, for one is neither academic nor a poet, but just 50/50 of both. Had these money-grabbing schemes been successful, there should have been many Nobel laureates in America. Name one. Most of the great writers came before the age of Creative Writing classes, and they did not own MFA degrees. Why is it so? There are so many philosophy teachers nowadays but not many philosophers, and there are so many poetry-writing teachers but so few great poets. What’s up with that? The means and the methodology have become the end, in and of itself. How absurd.
I prefer a poet who is a plumber, a laborer, or a beekeeper because if they are really dedicated to the art, they will be writing poetry regardless of their occupation—while working even at a bank (like Eliot) or at an insurance agency (like Stevens)—because they cannot help it. Plus, they have real life experience from which they can draw their inspiration; in fact, I prefer teaching Research Writing or even Technical and Business Communications to Creative Writing Classes because they deal with hard facts, here and right now.
In short, ask yourself this simple question: “Would people still find your work fresh and relevant in fifty years from now?” I would like to write something lasting; a work of art carved in rock, and not made of straw and mud. I’d guess nearly 95% of what is produced today will last only a few months, if not nanoseconds on the Web. Great works of art take bloody effort as if your life depends on it because it is not a factory fart arriving every second at the end of a conveyer belt by the millions, soaked deep in this high fructose literary corn syrup.
TTQ – How do you deal with writer's block?
Yoon Sik Kim – I do not have “writer’s block” as such because when I have nothing to write about, I quit: Tempus tacendi, tempus loquendi (There are times to shut up and times to speak up) So what? Silence is a part of speech. Go work your bees, get stung once in a while, go run six miles (I do this every day), water your tomatoes, brushhog the pasture, or go watch your daughters playing volleyball matches, etc. Do not dwell on this silence; that is how nature works. Embrace it. Enjoy the quietude for a while.
I think it is unnatural for anyone to be creative, in full throttle, all the time. For example, can you name ten masterpieces of your favorite author, or your favorite vocal group? Including Shakespeare, I find it difficult to name ten great works of a single author, attesting how challenging it is to be creative all the time at the highest level. Flood and drought works like yin and yang, the one and the same. As we age, it is natural for our creativity to trickle down despite your dedication and discipline. And it should and I am glad. Sure, it will be great if you can write two or more great poems a day as I used to when young. But I feel as though being silent is essential and necessary, a prerequisite to being creative, and I use such periods of “drought” to recharge my creative battery, knowing fully well that it takes a while to fill it up again, and that once it is full, I will be writing again.
During this drought, I tend to write haikus, a mental workout of sort, and use them as my “primary pigment,” the poetic scaffold, upon and around which I can build a solid poem. Many of my “good” poems, in fact, came into being through this exercise. This strategy helped me maintain my creative thinking while writing is slow. Reading classics also helps me accelerate the recharging process, as well. In short, read a lot, write a lot, and practice a lot—because your life depends on it. When you read a lot, you develop this “BS detector,” and this aesthetic sensibility will help you discriminate the chaff from the grain. Be patient and go slow but keep at it, no matter what. Never listen to the others who have not published any meaningful works or published out of his/her own pocket. These are the loudest in advising others.
What is odd for me is this: I write more/better when I am under pressure. When I am stressed or very busy, my creative juicy flows better as if to help me find ways, through which I could vent my angst. The more and the deeper I engage myself in non-poetry writing activities, the more I can write poetry. Isn’t that odd? That seems more natural for me.
Finally, the most important practice I have been doing as a writer is writing a journal entry every day: mine goes so far back as to early 1980’s. Numerous journal entries have been transformed into fine poems. If you don’t have time to do anything else, you must keep a journal: it helps you improve your writing, it offers you an opportunity for your mind to talk to itself (self-reflection), it helps you see things clearly, and keeping a journal can be very therapeutic if you are going through tough times. In fact, keeping a journal is so fundamental that I was not even going to mention it, as it is a given.
TTQ – What book of poetry (other than your own) would you recommend a novice reader of poetry read and why?
Yoon Sik Kim – Personally, I realize it may sound weird, especially coming from a guy like me, but I do not recommend a novice reader of poetry to read any particular poetry book, especially if this person wants to be a poet down the road. Instead, I would recommend him/her to read good prose—such as Hemingway’s, Homer’s Iliad in translation, or The History by Herodotus. A solid prose reads like good poetry, but rarely vice versa. I grant that they could be prose poems, as well. The only distinction between them is the length, poetry being the shorter of the two, as it is more intense, concentrated, and thus powerful. An epic, for example, is a dead poetry to modern audience although it was a great medium when they had no other modes of entertainment inside the smoky cave. Worse, our attention span now cannot sustain or endure such a long-winded “busteous lumpus.”
Another good exercise is to condense a book, a good prose, into a poem, less than a page. Poetry writing is like making a delicious chicken soup that takes three days to simmer. You start with a bucketful of water and the chicken in a large pot, and then boil and reduce the whole concoction into a tiny bowl so that it will retain the bare essence of the chicken soup, having evaporated the non-essential.
I recommend the above mentioned books as they have been time-tested through the ages; they retain everlasting values unlike any literary fad we see in every age. I much prefer to read The Sun Also Rises, for example, to any “great poems” recommended by others. That’s just me. As Edmund Wilson once said, I get this sense of soul-cleansing when I read Hemingway’s clean prose: his writing refreshes my tired mind with luminosity and clarity as if I am looking at clean pebbles at the bottom of a clear mountain stream because he spent hours and hours and hours to find the exact word, blinking his indefatigable “Bullshit Detector.” I believe your Canadian readers will also enjoy Terre des Homme or Vol de Nuit (both in French original) by Saint Exupery, another great French writer. Again I prefer to read writing that comes from real life experience, and not just out of fertile imagination in isolation, because I love the hard labor of living.
People in my circle, I know, question my aesthetic sensibility since I admire Hemingway: they think he was a womanizing, drinking, fighting, no good SOB, and he was. But they will never recognize it is his craftsmanship that makes him stand apart from the rest. Learn to separate the art from the artist. Reading his prose is like watching an UHD (Ultra High Definition) TV: clear, visual, simple, sharp, and refreshing.
TTQ – What’s next for Yoon Sik Kim?
Yoon Sik Kim – Thanks to my due diligence, dedication, and discipline, I have, over the years, written hundreds of poems, some already published and most publishable, and I am in the process of sorting them into my next series of books while composing new ones. Great things in life take time and sacrifice, and I am in no hurry. Having published one, the rest will follow easily.
When I taught at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, AR, I had to commute back to Oklahoma every two weeks because it took nearly 5 hours, one way, to come home. At one point, my family came to visit me from Oklahoma, and my girls were not yet even in their teens. The school had generously accommodated me with a room in the girls’ dorm so that I could save some money, as I was unable to purchase a home in the downtown Little Rock area. It was then my second daughter Sarah and the youngest Ariel confided to me that they had missed their Daddy at home so much so that they often hugged my worn, stinky, leather sandals I had left at the front porch at home. This vision murdered and crucified me, a sudden eye-opener, chastising me that I have been focusing on my career, my job, my research, my writing, and my publication: the goddamn me, me, me, me, and me—this fundamental American ethos. From then on, I was determined to do something for others, once and for all.
It was around then when an old colleague tracked me down after more than ten years of incommunicado. This former colleague was from Liberia, he was running for the President of his homeland, and he sought me out to help him conceptualize nation-building efforts for his poverty-stricken, war-torn country. He was confident that I was the right choice for the job. Determined to help others, I embraced the challenge. I created the party platform, the blueprint as to how to run a country. I was responsible for all aspects of nation-building and election campaign, including speech-writing and the conceptual framework of the party platform: uniting various warring factions together, establishing law and order for everyday security, rebuilding war-torn infrastructures, transforming former child-soldiers for gainful employment through vocational and professional job-training, developing sustainable green carbon-based economy, eradication of government and other corruption, financial accountability and transparency, encouraging foreign investment and partnership, rebuilding Liberian educational system, and resurrecting the civil-war ravaged nation out of its smoldering cinders and ashes.
This was the most rewarding work I have ever done since it was a volunteer work. How often do we get the chance to run a country? Unfortunately, my candidate lost the bid due to clever maneuvering by the current President who, right before the election, quickly enacted this “10-year residential requirement” law, virtually eliminating any viable competitors. Originally, she, the first woman President of Africa, had promised not to run for the second term, observing the tradition of Nelson Mandela. Again, I am going to help my colleague for his election effort for the next five years because the blueprint I have envisioned will impact and help millions of underprivileged and underrepresented people in the Republic of Liberia: once I too was one of those kids in a nameless village, running around nearly buck-naked, in the third world Korea.
In the meantime, there are three things I care about: writing, running, and beekeeping. Writing keeps my head clear; running, my body agile and lean; and beekeeping, my mind in tune with nature and seasonal ebbs and flows. I started beekeeping about thirty years ago to lose myself—only to find myself there later. After early morning writing, I spend my best days in my bee yards, miles and miles away from any human habitat and noise, drowned in the loud buzz, made by millions of flying bees. Completely lost, I become one with nature, indistinguishable and insignificant. I love this self-effacing aspect of my country life. What more could a humble disciple of Lao-tzu want?
Regarding this interview and my work, I would love to hear any feedback from your readership: please send me an email at vincent.earthboy@gmail.com
Thank you very much.
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