Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.

Women are foils to men. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance.

Living in South 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.

We have certain rules for traditional lyric poetry in Korea. I twist my body, confused by what to say and how to act, facing these rules. Confronting traditional lyricism, I speak with a bare body without the tattoos of culture on it.

I did not have any role model. I could not learn anything from the female voice that male poets used, a voice which is more "feminine" than female. Nor could I learn anything from ancient female poetry that only sang about love, the feeling of farewell and longing for others.

I came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship. The body that was broken into pieces is a sick body. I put the disease of this world and my sick body together.

Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.