It was when the poet Kim Hyesoon was working at a publishing house. It was the late days of a dictatorship, a time when the government pre-censored every publication released in the country. Writings that could not be published came back slathered in black coal tar. One day the poet was summoned to the police station. A detective demanded the address of the translator of the problem book and slapped Kim Hyesoon across the face. Seven times. “I don’t know.” After returning home, from the next day she skipped work at the publisher and wrote one poem per slapseven poems. They became the ‘That Place’ series.

“That place, blazing with light/ where you cannot even take your shadow inside/ bright even with your eyes closed/ where, even in sleep, you can see your own skull throbbing/ bright/ that place, the world’s greatest workshop of creation…” (<Hell of a Certain Star>, from ‘That Place 1’)

Kim Hyesoon’s keynote address ‘Tongueless Mother Tongue’ at the 2023 Berlin Poetry Festival contains an anecdote from when she worked as an editor. In the piece, the poet also says, “When people in our country ask me, as a poet, the questions they ask most often, ‘Why do you write poetry, what does any of this mean?,’ I answer that I built a ghost that keeps generating the ghost my voice became, because I could not possibly live here, because I could not possibly write without dying here. That poetry is death,”

[Flat] Poet Kim Hyesoon’s ‘Autobiography of Death’… First in Asia to win the ‘HKW International Literature Award’

<Ventriloquism of the Air> is a collection of poetics by Kim Hyesoon, who began her career by publishing poems in the winter 1979 issue of ‘Munhakgwa Jiseong’ and has continued writing poetry for 47 years through this year. It gathers 13 essays she serialized in the literary magazine ‘Axt’ and six pieces selected from domestic and overseas lectures and various media, including ‘Tongueless Mother Tongue’. These are works through which one can glimpse the literary world of a poet who, in addition to domestic literary prizes, has won the Griffin Poetry Prize in Canada, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Germany’s International Literature Award, and who, as the first Korean writer, was selected last year as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), expanding the territory of contemporary Korean poetry worldwide.

When she began her series in Axt, the poet said she took ‘Where does literature begin’ as her guiding question. At the center lies the word ‘ventriloquism’. “Inside a literary work lives a ventriloquist. Ventriloquism is a trick. The writer first deceives herself. The writer knows the speaker in the work is different from herself. … Fiction is a lie about what has been designated as reality, and poetry is a lie about what has been designated as language.”

A writer turns the experiences of the world surrounding her into an inner voice. “As my imaginary experience is embodied, my body comes to be in the field of generation without rupture from nature.” And at this moment, literature’s ventriloquism is “not imitation but meshing to engender one another.” The poet recalls that after her father died, while writing the collection <Phantom Pain of Wings> (Munhakgwa Jiseongsa), she “kept summoning birds without end.” “I thought of birds that fall from the air and die. I thought of that ventriloquism of the air. I thought of the slain who ventriloquize through the lips of our living beings and things.”

Woven throughout the book are the questions and answers the poet has persistently offered in her poetry collections, essay collections, and poetics about ‘what it means for a woman to write’ and ‘what it means for a woman to do poetry,’ along with stories of women’s lives and deaths that connect the self to the mother to the grandmother. “A representative feature of feminine writing is ‘relation’. Above all, it is the relation of woman and woman, the mother and the daughter, the dead mother and the daughter. It is a relation that pushes forward until mother becomes daughter and daughter becomes mother. While writing poetry, the mother loses the mother, and the daughter loses the daughter. In the end, poetry renders the loss of identity into letters.”

The poet says she ventriloquizes the stories of others within her own body and sends them out into the world, yet this is also an act of saving herself, or the woman within herself.

“The ‘female beast’ is the other of the other that is me. A pitiable being. Through my writing I compose this female beast. I bring it about that each of my poems composes the bare naked body of this one female beast.”

Kim Hyesoon is said to have thought it would be good if those who are vaguely beginning literary writing would read the pieces included in this book. It is a book through which, in Kim Hyesoon’s language, one can follow where the language of poetry is conceived, through what process it is uttered, and how it takes its stand in the world.