Ku Sang (1919 - 2004) was a Korean poet.
1. Life
Ku Sang was raised in Wonsan, in South Hamgyeong Province which is now situated in North Korea. His parents were Catholic and his older brother was a priest, but after studying in Japan he had a crisis of faith and only returned to Catholicism later in life. Ku returned to the area of his upbringing, working as a journalist and writer. His first poems were written while he was a student in Japan and he has steadily written and published volumes of poetry, as well as essays on social, literary, and spiritual topics, he has also written a number of plays, and edited literary anthologies. The collection Mogwa ongduriedo sayeoni (모과 옹두리에도 사연이 Even the Knots on Quince Trees) contains poems evoking his life's progress through the agonies of modern Korean history.
Ku made his literary debut publishing the poems "Gil" (길 Path), "Yeomyeongdo"(여명도 Dawn Portrait), and "Bam" (밤 Night) in Eunghyang in 1946, a volume put out by the Wonsan Writers League. These poems were severely criticized by the Communist authorities and he was soon forced to flee to the south, where he served as assistant director of the writers' group that was deployed to cover the activities of the South Korean military during the Korean War. He also served as editor-in-chief of the Yeongnam Ilbo, editorial writer for the Kyunghyang Shinmun, and as a lecturer on poetry at Chung-Ang University. He was a member of the Korean Academy of Arts. Ku died on May 11, 2005.
2. Writing
Ku Sang's poetry is marked by a rejection of the refined symbolism and artificial rhetoric found in the often more highly esteemed work of poets such as So Chong-ju. Instead, Ku Sang often begins his poems with the evocation of a personal moment of perception, in the midst of the city or of nature, and moves from there to considerations of more general import, where the poem frequently turns into a meditation on the presence of Eternity in the midst of time. A number of poems refer to the poet's struggle with tuberculosis, but many are hymns celebrating the wonder of being alive. Ku has spoken out clearly on the ecological issues that are now popular, pinpointing the pollution of the Han River as not only a crime against nature but as a symbol of the moral corruption of contemporary humanity. [1]
Ku's work is grounded in his Christian faith, which offers the poet a perennial source of personal repentance. The poet's stance manifests itself vividly in his second collection of poetry, Chotoui si (초토의 시 Wasteland Poems), dedicated to close friend and artist Lee Jung Seob, who drew the cover art. These poems draw upon Ku's own experience of the Korean War, and describe the process of surmounting the suffering engendered by war and of achieving salvation.
The work of Ku Sang has always found a welcome among readers eager for poetry that addressed the essential meaning of life and sang the simple experiences of truth that mark the poet's own life. The apparent simplicity of Ku Sang's poetic world has meant that until quite recently his work was undervalued in the world of critical opinion. It is now recognized that in Ku Sang, Korea has produced a major religious poet of great originality and utter personal integrity, the authenticity of whose vision is attested by the publication of translations of his poems in French, English, German, Italian and Japanese.
