& later I realised I was halfway through my journey waiting for a phone call (but I couldn't remember my own name. waking up to the sound of drilling wearing a t-shirt backwards I heard the dogs bark outside (artists drank soju & looked at leaves as if they were maps & the traffic was silent & to meet travellers who might be gone by nightfall, oh! wash- ing piling up in my room without seeing stars when I didn't need a candle without a breeze from the sea & showering under a cold hose. passing the ajumma out the front of her seafood restaurant (that took my breath away smiling at the girls holding hands at the markets. green revenue stamps from the immigration department layered like a thinking plate of kim chi & about my faraway family (or an overwhelming grief as humid as bowls of bubbling soup. then the phone call made it all different. where old men sit in the park on newspapers listening to the trills of old ladies at sweet stalls. in which season is it now on the verge of turning. when my wallet bulged in my pocket, staring at holes in the bottom of empty soju glasses, watching as Koreans dreamed on the subways or standing in line. catching pigeons with a net I eat dinner alone in a city where everyone eats together, pore over hangul script crossing roads & counting seconds as the lights change wasted checking emails with a mosquito and a ceiling fan buzzing in my ears fished for hope in streams step- ping over puddles of spittle in the street. I no longer recall Australian radio stations. those were really days drinking coffee cold from a can land of caffeine calm
Tag: asialink (page 2 of 5)
By this time tomorrow I’ll be winging my way to South Korea via Helsinki, touching down at Seoul’s Incheon International Airport and hoping that the BBC’s weather forecast for Friday—fine and sunny, 30C—turns out to be accurate and long-lasting.
Otherwise, I’m afraid that my hoju body will not be able to cope with the stifling humidity, sheets of bucketing rain and all-out urban mayhem that is Seoul in late summer.
Sure, the typhoon season’s just about over but something tells me I’ll be in for a wild summer storm or two before the weather starts to settle down in September.
By then I’ll hopefully be well settled down myself. I’ve already secured an apartment for my three month residency, and it’s in a good location (I hope) in Banpo-dong on the south side of the Han River.
It’s very close to Gangnam and the KLTI (or, as I’ll refer to it from now on, ‘The Institute’) in Samseung.
While I’m still not exactly sure what I’ll be doing at The Institute, I’m certain it will involve lots of reading, even more writing and a healthy dose of conversation.
More than that I am not prepared to say.
Tomorrow is always another first day.
In the northern summer of 2005, I caught a plane from Frankfurt to Seoul to undertake an Asialink residency at Sogang University. This summer, I’ll be doing it all again, only this time my host for the residency will be the Korea Language Translation Institute (KLTI) in Gangnam.
I’m really looking forward to returning to Seoul. The four months I spent there in 2005 were really beneficial in terms of the amount of writing I got done, as well as the rewarding (if challenging) experience I gained while teaching in the Korean educational system.
This time around I’ll be doing something completely different, namely assisting the KLTI with the editing of English translations of Korean texts. And if that sounds like a bit of a tongue twister, you’re probably saying it right. I mean doin ir rong.
The KLTI is located in Gangnam, on the other side of the Han from Sogang University and Insadong, the touristic part of Seoul where I lived in a hostel for the duration of my stay in 2005. I’m hoping this time around to find somewhere in Hongdae or even closer to Gangnam itself …
The Seoul metro system, which I caught every day to and from Sogang University, is fast, cheap and reliable. It’s a great buzz to ride the metro at peak hour, and to see the fantastic cross-section of Korean society travelling together, slowly waking up. In that sense it doesn’t really matter where I’m staying anyway.
Seoul is of course a networked city in several other important respects. The city boasts one of the highest rates of broadband internet usage in the world; while at street level this excess of connectivity flows through the PC Bangs and via roaming mobile broadband networks. The flow of people and ideas.
In 2005 I spent a lot of my time in PC Bangs, probably too much time. I’m not sure whether I want to spend up to four or five hours each day writing in these places like I did then. I wrote about thirty poems (a selection of which were later published as Morgenland) and forty prose poems in PC Bangs.
I also took a lot of photos of PC Bangs signage and logos, of which the example above is possibly the most exuberant.
Since then a few of the poems, and several of the prose ‘Imaginary Cities’ have been published in various journals. In another respect however, these pieces now seem more like first drafts than anything else – dense, over-expressive, abstracted, occasionally unintelligible.
I’m looking forward to finding ways of building upon the ideas expressed in these early pieces, and it might be fun to see how many of the original PC Bangs I can re-discover – just as long as there’s a cold beer waiting for me in some shady beerhof afterwards.
Till next time, annyeung.
Even as the dust begins to settle on We Will Disappear, there’s no time for a busy poet like me to rest. I’m proud to announce that I’ve got a new chapbook out through the highly-esteemed Vagabond Press, whose editor Michael Brennan runs the Poetry International Australia website, and who is, by the way, a very cool guy.
The chapbook is called Morgenland and it contains 19 poems. It’s published in traditional A5 format, with a nice cream cover and a unique photo/image by Kay Orchison gracing the cover. I’ll post a reproduction of the image here soon.
At 24 pages, Morgenland is apparently one of the longest Vagabond Rare Objects chapbooks ever, but don’t let that fool you. Only 100 copies of this little gem have been produced, and each one has been signed and numbered by moi.
This makes Morgenland one of the rarest objects in my (currently flimsy) back-catalogue, so if you’d like to snap up one of my copies, then be fast. I only have ten of these to sell, and at AUD$12 (including postage and handling within Australia), that’s a frickin steal.
To reserve your copy, leave a comment (see link above) and be sure to include your email address so I can get back to you. Otherwise you can email me on davey [squiggle] daveydreamnation {dot} com. For those who are too slow, check back on eBay in a couple of years and get ready to seethe.
Most of the poems were written while undertaking an Asialink residency at Sogang University, Seoul in 2005. You can view the complete set of Morgenland drafts online here. These poems should not be confused with my Imaginary Cities project which is still in the publishing wilderness, but which I know will one day find a home befitting its quirkiness.
Track listing:
ALONE IN AN AIRPORT II
JETLAG WORLD
SOUND OF VITALITY
WHITE SPACE
SNOW GROCER
HOJU BIHANG-GI
NAGASAKI CROWS
TRANS*
THE HANOK FIELDS
DRUNK AS KO UN
MAKKOLLI MOON
MOKOCHUKCHA
SAIHOU JODO
IMAGINARY MAO
SNOW SEA SWAN
LONELY PLANET
ICEBERGS
MORIAPO
BACK TO THE TOURIST III
JETLAG WORLD
SOUND OF VITALITY
WHITE SPACE
SNOW GROCER
HOJU BIHANG-GI
NAGASAKI CROWS
TRANS*
THE HANOK FIELDS
DRUNK AS KO UN
MAKKOLLI MOON
MOKOCHUKCHA
SAIHOU JODO
IMAGINARY MAO
SNOW SEA SWAN
LONELY PLANET
ICEBERGS
MORIAPO
BACK TO THE TOURIST III
Liner notes:
An earlier version of ‘Alone In An Airport II’ appeared in this chapbook’s companion volume Abendland (self-published, 2006). ‘Hoju Bihang-gi’ first appeared online in Peril. ‘Back to the Tourist III’ first appeared online in Softblow.
Thank you Nikki Anderson, Michael Brennan, Keiji Minato, An Sonjae, Sang Kee Park, Joseph, Tan, Larissa Hjorth, Alexie Glass, Moon Sun Choi, Joo Young Lee, Kathleen Asjes, Anouk Hoare, Andrew Cook, Sean Heaney, Hiroshi Sasaki, Steve Riddell, Kevin Puloski, Young Eun Pae and Bridget O’Brien. Thanks also to the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australia-Korea Foundation for their generous support.
Last year, as part of my Asialink residency in Seoul, I wrote an article for the Australian National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) on the subject of my experience of teaching a course on Australian culture at Sogang University. Here’s a quick excerpt:
I have sung the national anthem (‘a capella?’ one incredulous fellow-traveller asked me) and ‘Waltzing Matilda’, tried to explain bizarre Australian terms like ‘beach bum’ and ‘laconic’ and even spent a few moments discussing Shane Warne’s penchant for cigarettes and text messaging. I now have sitting in front of me a stack of essays on famous Australians, including Ned Kelly, Kylie Minogue and Oodgeroo Nonnuccal. Strangely enough, only one student chose to write about John Howard.
‘Taking Kylie To Korea’, NTEU Advocate (March 2006)
The article has been published in the March 2006 issue of the NTEU’s Advocate magazine but you can read the original version online or download it here: Taking Kylie to Korea (PDF).
The article contains one small factual error: in the final sentence I state that the way to say ‘I am Australian’ in Korean is hoju saram, when in reality the correct way to say it is hoju saram ipnida.
Just in case anyone’s ever called on to explain US foreign policy while travelling in Korea.
Then again, perhaps it’d be even more useful to know how to say ‘I am not an American’ in that delightful but difficult language.