International sijo

I will soon go to Korea to participate in a conference on sijo, the famous three-line Korean poetic form. The conference will be held in Changnyeong, south of Daegu, a rural area where the Seong family originated. My part will be to talk about the internationalization of sijo, as sijo is being recognized and composed in English in many parts of the world.

Sijo in English! This means translation of Korean sijo, on the one hand, and original compositions in English in the regulated verse format that is uniquely sijo, on the other hand.

I am happy to report that sijo is being written in English. And there are sijo contests. And websites. And books published. And seminars online and in person. All on original sijo compositions in English.

The leader in sijo activity in the English-speaking world is the Sejong Cultural Society based in Chicago. For 19 years they have sponsored a contest for American students, and then in 2018, they created an adult division, separate from the student division. And in 2021, they created an International division which has been successful in attracting sijo writers in English from around the world. They have had winners, first, second, third or honorable mention from Vietnam, Indonesian, Tanzania, Germany, Canada and India.

The Sejong Cultural Society also holds seminars for teachers, in Chicago every summer, which are also available online. Teaching teachers enables the teaching of students. For every teacher at the seminar, there are up to a hundred students that can be taught.

There are websites on sijo. The best, again, is that of the Sejong Cultural Society, but there are others, too. And there are regional sijo contests — one for Wisconsin, one for Ohio, one for the LA Korea Culture Center.

On Feb. 7, this year, the Sejong Cultural Society led the way in one more decisive move — in cooperation with several sijo organizations in Korea, they announced World Sijo Poetry Day. We hope this will stimulate the teaching of sijo in schools across America, the world and in Korea, too, for that matter. The date chosen is the day that U Tak, the first to author a sijo in the 13th century, is honored in the shrine dedicated to him — it’s also in the middle of the school year, and ideal time for sijo to be studied.

But with all the success that we see sijo has had, there is another way to look at it, and that is to compare sijo to haiku. Japanese haiku has achieved complete success in America. Haiku, a shorter but similar three-line poem, is much better known and much more successful in America and the English-speaking world. Every student in America in the third or fourth grade not only learns about haiku, but they all write one. EVERY student in America. This is not an exaggeration. To that extent the Japanese public relations people have been totally successful.

Why? One reason is that the Japanese, both government and private corporations, have contributed heavily, for years, to Japanese studies programs in the U.S. Korean contributions to U.S. Korean studies programs don’t begin to catch up, and unlike Japan, most Korean contributions are funneled through the Korea Foundation leaving very little contributed directly from corporations. Unlike Japan.

What is to be done? We are doing a lot, as indicated above, but there is so much more to be done to reach the level of haiku in America. My dream is to see a Sijo Research Center established with generous funding to enable a small team of committed teachers and writers to reach out to every school district in America — there are about 3,000 of them — to offer seminars on how to teach sijo, and to help finance, region by region, contests and publications of winning sijo.

It wouldn’t take a lot of money, but it would take some. The Sejong Cultural Society, again, is the role model. They host seminars for teachers to teach them how to cover sijo in their classes, and to generate some excitement about sijo. The costs are not great — a honorarium for the instructors, and books and a monetary award for the teachers who come.

The key to teaching teachers is the requirement they all have to pick up “points” by attending all kinds of seminars through the year, and especially in the summer. The sijo seminars can be certified to provide appropriate “points” as an incentive for teachers to choose the sijo seminar.

Then regions by region contests can be created to provide incentives for students to write good sijo. Again, money would be necessary, but not large sums — a few hundred for prize money and a few hundred for judges. This is already being done by the Sejong Cultural Society — it just needs to be implemented all across the country.

If you’d like a budget proposal and a detailed plan, just let me know. I’m ready.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is associate professor of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.