Tag: korea (page 7 of 10)

5 August 2009 / 0 Comments

Some interesting Korean book titles …

… discovered recently:

‘I Have the Right to Destroy Myself’*
‘Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers’
‘Poor Love Machine’
‘Look, Calendar Factory Manager’
‘The Korean Way of Tea’
‘Lebanon Emotion’
‘Happy People Don’t Check the Time’
‘The Outings of Snake-boy’
‘I Am a Season That Does Not Exist in This World’
‘Quietly Liking’
‘Mechanical Parrot’
‘When I Take Off My Wet Shoes’
‘The Soil Has Square-shaped Memories’
‘The Silver Trout-fishing Network’
 

* This is the only one I have read so far – I bought a copy in the Kyobo bookshop the other day. It is not very long and (in my humble opinion) not very good but its author Young-Ha Kim has been described as ‘a Korean literary cult figure’. I look forward to finding out your impressions of the book when you get here and have a chance to read it – unless you’ve read it already!

29 July 2009 / 2 Comments

No! Sleep! Till Gangnam!

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.

9 October 2007 / 1 Comment

Morgenland chapbook out now!

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

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.

31 March 2006 / 0 Comments

Taking Kylie To Korea

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.

2 February 2006 / 3 Comments

Babble post mortem and pics

As I’ve not really performed as such for over six months, I of course went into last night’s ‘feature’ gig at Babble, Melbourne’s premier spoken word event, with grand plans and unpredictable outcomes.

A small but generous crowd witnessed me limping through some old poems and some new pieces from my time overseas.

First up was a risky gambit: a reading of my poem “There’s A Wild Jack Russell In the Moon” featuring a piano soundtrack I recorded years ago, with me miming playing the piano and trying to remember the words to the poem. It was probably a bit long for an opening piece but it felt good to challenge myself to improvise the poem, and it got a few laughs.

Next was “the Sprawl”, my poem for Bruce Springsteen, and I was happy with my ability to remember the words (it’s quite long).

Next, another risky move, a new poem set to the tune of an Enya song, which started out funny but got sadder as it went on. Weird.

Next, I read my poem “The Boys Who”, using cards to recite each line (“the boy who was a nut …” and so on).

David Prater, LIVE at Babble.

After that, I felt that my energy levels were fading a bit. It’s hard to keep them up sometimes but I guess this is something any performer would know more about than me. I read “Pigtails”, then a couple of poems from Korea: “Makkolli Moon” and “Snow Grocer”.

Part of the reason for the change of pace was the fact that these were newer poems and, being less prepared that I perhaps could have been, I was forced to read these poems from the page.

But in another way, I don’t really see anything wrong with reading poems from the page, as long as you’re mixing it up … anyway!

Mokochukcha!

I ended with a reading of “Mokochukcha”, featuring a guest appearance from a bottle of soju I’d bought at the Korean grocer on Brunswick Street, Fitzroy.

I took a swig from the bottle every time I said the word “mokochukcha” (Korean for ‘drink and die’).

As this word occurs nine times in the poem, I was fairly tipsy by the end.

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