Real Stories Impress -- confessional poetry over the sea

Confessional poetry, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, directly reflected the poet's experiences. The poets who wrote in this style frankly poured all their personal stories into their works.Anne Sexton, in her poem For My Lover, Returning To His Wife, tells about her most personal story: adultery. I wanted to introduce a Korean writer who tells that her writings are "personal and confessional."


Wan suh Park, born in 1931 and passed away just a few months ago, mainly wrote about her experiences during the 50s and 60s, the times that confessional poetry was prevailing in the states. I first got to know Park because my mom was one of Park's most passionate fans; Park's books were always on the kitchen counter in my house. Park was definitely one of the most revered writer in her country South Korea. I remember an editorial that said that the only reason she never received Nobel Prize in Literature was that her language is so delicate complex that the translated works of hers can't convey the original emotion.

In 1950, when she was only 19 years old freshman in college, the war broke out. She lost her father when she was only three and she was separated from her mother by the North Korean army during the war. Park soon had to drop out of college when her brother, who went out to the front as militia, died from injury. The bereavement traumatized her, and writing was the only thing that comforted her. "I wonder if I would have started writing if it wasn't the war", Park says in one of her interviews. Later in 1988, Park's husband and only son (she still had four girls), and this loss kept her involved in writing.


In her autobiographical novel Who Ate Up All the Shinga?, Park tells about her childhood and tragic wartime experience. In the preface of this novel she says she doesn't know if she can call this kind of writing a novel - it was more like a diary that she wrote purely depending on her memories. She confesses that she "wanted to testify to the events in her life in a thoughtful and candid way." Park was for sure a confessional poet during contemporary period, just in a different country.