poems | essays | photographs
There will be a Yoon Yong poem today & tomorrow. I promise. Appearances …My cheekbones are fine | my chin if a little chiseled. I don’t agree with where my hair parts the same as my father’s | not symmetrical like my mother. Glad I got mother’s long legs but my father’s [...]
Yoon Yong. Nostalgia …The morning news buzzing in the background... —Her father stopped reading the newspaper when his sight grew dim. She liked to see him read: she felt in good hands | that her father could guide her. She tried to replicate the paper’s cackle with other materials—my own onomatopoeia [...]
Yoon Yong wakes into her final day on Jeju Island. This isn't the last of the series, but it's coming. It must be the final day …At dawn | the magpie matinee | oriole | finch | white eye | starling | wren & sparrow shaking the air | the thick brush & [...]
Yoon Yong is edging closer to the end now. Just so you know, hagwons, in Korea, are privately run academies, which children attend as well as school. They are largely English academies, however there are math, science & art hagwons too. They fill a void school's cannot fill due to the Korean school system not [...]
Finally pulled my thumb out & turned my computer on. So many books to read. Here we have Yoon Yong, mothering doubtfully, exposing her flaws through the flesh she has produced, as the image she produces in her dream. The biological aspect through the child image, becoming psychological to tell the identity where it falls [...]
Thanks to David Cooke for taking these two very different, very new poems; one written in December while I was in Brixham over Christmas & the other written only a week or so ago. Accompanying the poems are a few hundred words of explanatory prose on the hyperobject, a term I use in the poem [...]
Still a bit to go from the Yoon Yong poems. The revolution was televised …The protest to impeach Park Geun-hye on those cold December nights when the people cupped LED candles for “moral warmth” & made Gyeongbokgung resemble a map of the observable universe circumscribed with its own light —it was then I [...]
Metaphor to magnify This may be a bit rambling, it may chime, but this is a semi-riff-with-structured-argument on a number of books (provided at the end) I have read in the past month (except Being & Time, which I am currently reading, but which has featured in good measure in Morton’s & Harman’s books). I [...]
Title says it all. I edited the inimitable Marie Marshall's journal of zen bones, the zen space. I was asked in winter & due to snowballing circumstances it took me a while to snap myself round; but I did, it is done, you can read it here, there's some good stuff & photography by me. [...]
Back to Yoon Yong, now nearing the end. We found Yoon Yong last time, riffing on marriage. Now she's drunk. Drink to forget (maybe Sunday) …That evening | walking down a busy road | enjoying the cool air discouraging the heat of the day but never quenching it & flanked by orange groves [...]
Novelist, travel writer, nature writer; lover of people and place.
“ There, I am desperately free and naive; but knowing this oh dear happiness, dear misery; there is no distinctive sign except that one tearing one’s heart, and a smile destined to nobody(...)" E.Stachura
all about travelling in korea
come lay down ink...
