Kleines Parkett 6/4€ | Tickets

Kim Hyesoon‘s (born 1955 in Uljin, Kyŏngsangbuk-do, South Korea) poetry lecture begins by recollecting the last days of the Fourth Republic (1972-1979), a time of economic growth and state repression in South Korea, when she herself worked in publishing as an editor and repeatedly witnessed state censorship. Books were banned; individual passages considered offensive were blackened with coal tar; she even attended an entirely censored play, performed without text. From this experience – the tongue’s dying before actual death – she develops a poetics of her own writing in the sign of absence: Poets connect with their deaths, use ghost voices preceding language, are capable of absorbing other voices and sounds. In Kim Hyesoon’s poetry, this creates a rich register between silences, sighs, cries, and moans. And reading a poem means inhaling spirits, putting readers in a state of being possessed.