Once, I compared poetry to mothers in my book called To Write as a Woman, because my mother is someone who captures me in her body and gave birth to me out of her desire but washed her hands of me after giving birth to me as a poet.

Women in Korean myths disappear after giving birth. The reason they were born is to produce sons.

As a sick kid, I always looked out the window. The objects of my observation were the sun, the seasons, the wind, crazy people, and my grandfather's death. During my long period of observation, I felt that something like poems were filling up my body. They were in some kind of state and condition that made them difficult to render into words. As a university student, I tried hard to write them in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.

When I became a poet, the Korean literary world expected women poets to sing passively of love. Naturally, this was not written anywhere, but this rule existed nonetheless. Consequently, I received plenty of serious criticism.

Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.

When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.

Living in Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in now.