Often found at theaters and museums, Kwon Mee-yoo has covered a wide range of cultural fields from K-pop and dramas to theater and fine art for over a decade. Now as K-Culture Desk editor, she tries to connect Korean culture with global readers through fresh perspectives.
Poet Choi Jeong-rye passes away at 66
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Poet Choi Jeong-rye
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Poet Choi Jeong-rye passed away Saturday at the age of 66. Known as one of Korea's most exacting and innovative poets, Choi wrote prose poems drawing strange qualities out of everyday experiences.
The poet was diagnosed with a rare blood disease last summer and died from cerebral hemorrhage while fighting the disease.
Born in 1955 in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, Choi studied Korean poetry at Korea University and earned her doctoral degree there.
She made her literary debut through "Hyeondae-sihak" (Contemporary Poetics) magazine in 1990 and published poetry collections such as "A Forest of Bamboo in My Ear" (1994), "Tigers in the Sunlight" (2001), "Crimson Field" (2001), "Lebanese Emotion" (2006), "Kangaroo is Kangaroo I am I" (2011) and "Ditch is Dragon's Hometown" (2015).
"Light Net" (translated title), published last November commemorating the 30th anniversary of her literary career, became her final publication before death.
She received a handful of awards including the Modern Literature Prize in 2007 and the Midang Literary Award in 2015.
"Instances," a collection of her poems co-translated into English by the poet, Wayne de Fremery and Brenda Hillman, was published in 2011.
Co-translator Hillman observed, "There is a quality of imagination in her work that is still a rare thing in poetry."
Choi also translated American poet James Tate's "Return to the city of white donkeys" into Korean, reflecting her interest in surrealist poems and languages.
She participated in the International Writing Program (IWP) as a poet at University of Iowa in 2006 and stayed for one year at University of California, Berkeley as a visiting writer in 2009. She was the writer in residence at the National Centre for Writing at Norwich UNESCO City of Literature in 2018.
Mattho Mandersloot, the poetry grand prize winner of the 51st Korea Times Translation Awards last year, translated Choi's poems including "1mg of Anaesthetic," which was included in "Net of Light,” referring to her struggle against hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis.
"I found her poetry at once relatable and incredibly imaginative, at times even cinematic," Mandersloot said. "One of the things that makes Choi's poetry so vivid, is the way in which she alternates voices. Some poems feature multiple characters talking to one another.”