Park Yong-rae

Park Yong-rae was a South Korean poet.^[1]

Life

Park was born on August 14, 1925 in Buyeo, Chungcheongnam-do Korea and died November 21, 1980.^[2] He graduated from the Ganggyeong Commercial High School, and debuted his work in 1956 with the publication of “Song of Autumn”. Park worked as a bank employee and teacher and middle and high schools.^[3] Park died on November 21, 1980.^[4]

Work

Park Yongrae’s poetic career was essentially quaratpartite. Beginning in the mid-1940s until the publication of his first collection Snow Grains (Ssarangnun), primarily exposits upon a motif of the primal consciousness of loneliness and despair. The poems from the second period of his career, which includes all the work after Snow Grains (Ssarangnun) until the published collection of Foxtails (Gangajipul), focus upon the purity of natural phenomena, celebrating it as such devoid from the artifice and pretense that contaminates the world constructed by man. Park’s poetry from his third stage of writing, after the publication of Foxtails (Gangajipul) to the publication of Baekbarui Kkotdaegung, provides a sharper contrast to the poems of the two previous stages of Park’s career. These poems, unlike those of the first two periods which celebrated a rustic lyrical consciousness, also include tentative explorations of relationships between man, as well as addressing address the weighty specter of death.^[5]

In Park's fourth period, and the waning of his life, Park confronts reality more boldly and introspectively. His memories intensify and his poetry begins to take on a more philosophical bent as approaching death causes Park to think more deeply about death and 'fundamental loneliness."^[3] His work from Baekbarui Kkotdaegung to his death, offers a shift in the artist’s perspective; it was in this phase that Park began to reject the escapism of his earlier works and expand his world view. Here the poet began to display a world consciousness and a new personal philosophy, as well as an attempt to utilize an Eastern sense of emptiness in order to divine the entirety of life. He filtered the sentiments of his poetry to their bare essence, and thereby began writing verse imbued with terse, yet comprehensive beauty. His complete immersion in this poetic method, his rejection of frivolity or garrulousness, stripped away all unnecessary language from his art and placed much importance on the blank spaces between the lines, almost as much as upon the lines themselves. The poems are also meant to be aesthetically pleasing; the form relies upon visual and auditory metaphors.

Though some critics label his poetry as monotonous and monochromatic, the bare structure and sparse wording of his poetry are essential to bringing objects of recollection into incisive focus. Even his technique of ending the lines of his poems with nouns or nominal suffixes rather than using standard sentence structure is proof that form and sketching method are integral to Park’s poetry.^[5]

Works in Korean (Partial)

• Snow Pellets (Ssaraknun, 1969)
• Foxtails ( Gang-ajipul, 1975)
• Distant Sea (Meon Bada, 1984)

Awards

• Korean Literature Author's Award (1980)
• Contemporary Poetry Prize (1969)
• Chungnam Culture Award (1961)

See also

• Korean Literature
• List of Korean-language poets

References