Kim Kwang-lim
김광림
Kim Kwang-lim (born 1929) is an early-modern South Korean poet.
Life
Kim Kwang-lim was born Kim Chung-nam on September 21, 1929 in Wonsan, South Hamgyeong Province. He took his pen name Kwang-lim by combining the names of the poets Kim Kwangkyun and Kim Kirim. His first published poem, Munpungji (문풍지 Paper Door), appeared in Yonhap Shinmun in 1948.
Kim counts the artist Lee Jung Seob, a frequent guest at his house when he was a teenager, as one of his formative influences as a poet. Besides his art, Lee also wrote poetry, which impressed the young Kim. Kim was also influenced by his father and maternal uncle's interest in literature. His uncle, in particular, possessed a complete set of Japanese editions of world literature, a rarity at the time. [1]
Kim graduated from Korea University with a degree in Korean literature in 1960, and later served as a professor at Jangan College and as the President of the Society of Korean Poets. A prolific writer, Kim has published numerous collections of poetry, amounting to roughly 900 poems by his own estimation.
Writing
The early poems of Kim Kwang-lim, included in his poetry collection Sangsimhaneun jeommok (상심하는 접목 Sorrow of a Grafted Tree) published in 1959, overflow with the raw pain and suffering endured as a result of the Korean War. After the armistice in 1953, Kim's poems evince a diminished attention to issues pertaining to the war or Korean society in general and a growing interest in describing phenomena, with a focus on visual imagery.
Following his second collection of poems, Simsangui balgeun geurimja (심상의 밝은 그림자 Bright Shadow of an Image), published in 1962, Kim's artistic endeavor focused on the conception of a perfect, pure image. Kim thus eliminated all abstraction from his works, and sought an aesthetic that would isolate the image and remove all external semantic associations from it.
In the 1970s, Kim's poetry began to incorporate elements of Seon Buddhism, crowning the poet's endeavor to eliminate prosaic elements and abstraction from his poetry and to isolate the bare, unobstructed image. Kim's fixation on realizing the perfect poetic depiction of an image and establishing a profound awareness of this image elevated his work and language to a new, transcendental plane. In fact, underlying his works is the development of a new poetic sensibility vis-a-vis external phenomena, the realization of the lucidity of language, and the creation of poetic expression through the construction of the image.
Following the publication of Eoneoro mandeun sae (언어로 만든 새 Bird Made of Language) in 1979, Kim rekindled his efforts to breach the limits of language and to stretch it to its extremes, through radical simplification of language by self-restraint akin to the practices of Seon Buddhism.
Kim is essentially an imagist and his poems often seem like quick glimpses of life in which human concern meets with tight poetic control. While Kim is cognizant of the role of materialism in modern society, his poetry seeks to overcome this with tolerance and forgiveness.
