Kim Kyung Ju (born July 14, 1976) is a South Korean poet and performance artist.
1. Life
Kim Kyung Ju was born in Gwangju. He studied philosophy at Sogang University and musical theatre writing at Korea National University of Arts. Kim made his literary debut in 2003 winning the Seoul Shinmun New Writer's Contest with five poems including "Kkot pineun gongjungjeonhwa" (꽃 피는 공중전화 Phone Box in Flower). His first collection of poetry, Naneun i sesange eomneun gyejeorida (나는 이 세상에 없는 계절이다 I Am A Season That Does Not Exist In the World), was published in 2006 and made waves in the literary world, selling over ten thousand copies.
In 2016, Kim made his debut as a playwright, winning the Dong-a Ilbo New Writer's Contest with his play Taeyeop (태엽 Clockwork). While Kim started out as a classic poet, he has changed his focus to performance poetry, theater, musicals and independent films. He has written and translated over 20 books of poetry, essays, and plays. His work is heavily anthologized in Korea. He has been the recipient of many prestigious awards. In 2008 his poem "Mureupui munyang" (무릎의 문양 Pattern Of a Knee) won the Writers' Pick for best poem of the year, an award judged by peers in the field of poetry. In 2009 he received Today's Young Artist Award by the Korean government and the Kim Su-Young Literary Award.
2. Writing
Kim Kyung Ju's poems frequently feature a narrator who wanders ceaselessly. Like nomads, the narrators of his poems refuse to settle down and enjoy exploring the limits of freedom. In the midst of this fluid journey, they sense the deep essence of life. Kim strives to preserve poetry in a world that has turned its back on it. He seeks to overcome the crisis that poetry faces today by interacting with other art forms. To that end, he not only writes poetry but is also deeply interested in performances and events, such as exhibitions and book concerts.
Kim’s background as a playwright and philosopher are apparent throughout his work. In his first collection of poetry, I Am A Season That Does Not Exist In the World, published in English in 2015, some poems take place in acts. Buddha, Jesus, Kant and Plato cohabitate the language by turn. Rather than treatises, however, the poems most often read as a dialogue between the speaker’s sense of the embodied world and traces of a disembodied world—what Plato might identify as the world of becoming, between a world of shadow and a world of pure form.[1]
In Kim’s poems, this category might more accurately be labeled unbecoming. Many poems contain fingernail clippings, dead skin, shaved hair, excesses of the body that offer material representation for what grows already dead from the body: “I find a black fingernail on the floor / that I used to play with. / Someday will I too come back in front of the time I lived / and be a roaming dream?” and “Let’s admit language is a name for peeling at the dead skin of life.”[1]
Kim’s poems play in the shadows. They also convey a strong sense of anxiety about the loss of interiority: “It cannot end like this, I thought— / a mass extinction of inner life.” The speaker pursues the heat lost from their body, a heat that correlates with the inner life, because “after the heat of the body is completely erased / a dried life exposes itself.”[1]
The final poem of the collection begins with “Let’s say you and I lied down together in the same place one time.” The invitation inherent to this statement has already expired in the past tense of “lied,” but it still means something to “say” it. This is a different sort of offering, one that exists outside of the world yet still exists in language. [1]
Reference
[1] Wattenberg, Madeleine. The Cincinnati Review. April 2, 2018. https://www.cincinnatireview.com/what-were-reading/what-were-reading-kim-kyung-jus-i-am-a-season-that-does-not-exist-in-the-world/
