Chae Ho-ki (Hangul: 채호기) is a modern

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

n poet.

Life

Chae Ho-ki was born on October 13, 1957 in

Daegu Daegu (, , literally 'large hill', 대구광역시), formerly spelled Taegu and officially known as the Daegu Metropolitan City, is a city in South Korea. It is the third-largest urban agglomeration in South Korea after Seoul and Busan; it is ...

and published his first poem in 1988 and since that time has been considered by South Korean critics as one of the major voices in

Korean literature Korean literature is the body of literature produced by Koreans, mostly in the Korean language and sometimes in Classical Chinese. For much of Korea's 1,500 years of literary history, it was written in Hanja. It is commonly divided into classica ...

Work

If a desire for emotional union with the subject matter can be described as a general characteristic of Korean poetry, Chae departs radically from such a tendency to seek instead the complete obliteration of the boundary between the subject and the language in his poetry. His first volume of poetry, ''Ferocious Love'', rejects love as an idea and an emotional state and focuses on its physicality and mortality: Desire itself is objectified and given a physicality in "The Sad Gay", in which a gay man transforms himself into another being through the mechanical process of replacing body parts: Chae's most successful attempt to create a oneness with another is judged to be his ''Water Lilies''. In this volume of poetry, language acts as a corrosive agent that melts away the external shape of things to reveal their true essence by means of which a perfect union with others is achieved."채호기" biographical PDF available at LTI Korea Library or online at:

Works in Korean (partial)

Poetry collections * Ferocious Love (Jidokhan sarang, 1992) * The Sad Gay (Seulpen gaei, 1994) * A Telephone of the Night (Bamui gongjung jeonhwa, 1997) * Water Lilies (Suryeon, 2002)

Awards

* 2002 Kim Su-yeong Literature Prize (Established since 1981 in honor of

Kim Soo-young Kim Suyeong was a Korean poet. Life Kim Soo-young (1921–1968) was a Korean poet and translator whose poetry explored love and freedom as poetic and political ideals. Kim was born in Gwancheol-dong, Seoul on November 27, 1921. After gradua ...

) (2002), for Water Lilies * 2007 올해의 출판인상 Award * 2007 National Contemporary Poetry Award

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Chae, Ho-ki 1957 births 20th-century South Korean poets Living people 21st-century South Korean poets South Korean male poets 20th-century male writers 21st-century male writers