“I Sell My Daughter for 100 Won”
Jang Jin-Sung Exhausted, in the midst of the market she stood “For 100 won, my daughter I sell” Heavy medallion of sorrow A cardboard around her neck she had hung Next to her young daughter Exhausted, in the midst of the market she stood A deaf-mute the mother She gazed down at the ground, just ignoring The curses the people all threw As they glared At the mother who sold Her motherhood, her own flesh and blood Her tears dried up Though her daughter, upon learning Her mother would perish of a deadly disease Had buried her face in the mother’s long skirt And bellowed, and cried But the mother stood still And her lips only quivered Unable she was to give thanks to the soldier Who slipped a hundred won into her hand As he uttered “It is your motherhood, And not the daughter I’m buying” She took the money, and ran A mother she was, And the 100 won she had taken She spent on a loaf of wheat bread Toward her daughter she ran As fast as she could And pressed the bread on the child’s lips “Forgive me, my child” In the midst of the market she stood And she wailed. Pulled into this poem by my interest from the title, I discovered that this poem is a story about heartache and grief from a mother and her daughter. The poet, Jang Jin-Sung, used to be a citizen and well renowned poet of North Korea. Kim Jong-Il even read and appreciated his work. In 2004, he left for South Korea and published several memoirs on living conditions in the North. This poem, published in a collection, shows the poor quality of life of the working class. Jang Jin-Sung criticized the North Korean regime through his poetry as he remembered the great famine of millions of citizens while the wealthy did not nothing but watch. This poem is not filled with metaphors or much figurative language, some meaning probably lost through translation, and mostly emphasizes the realism of the situation that the mother and daughter are in. The poem starts the first stanza with, “Exhausted, in the midst of the market she stood/For 100 won, my daughter I sell.” The first two lines are laced with heavy meaning--an exhausted mother revealed to be selling her own kin. The blunt statement reveals the tragic, albeit real, horror happening in present time. The next stanza describes how the mother ignores calls and shouts from others in the square, cursing her for doing such a shameful thing to her own daughter. Jin-Sung wrote, “A deaf-mute the mother/She gazed down at the ground, just ignoring.” So, why is she doing this to her own blood? Jin-Sung makes it clear in the next stanza where he reveals that the mother has a terminal illness that will kill her in a short while. It is apparent here that the mother cannot afford proper healthcare and wants to give away her daughter so that she can live in a comfortable home, although with a stranger. While Jin-Sung mentions that the daughter “bellowed” and “cried” the mother tried to stay strong showing that her “lips only quivered.” This is key to understanding that the mother wants to remain strong for her daughter, despite their diminishing chances of remaining together. In the fourth stanza, the cardboard sign becomes a reality when a soldier slips 100 won into the mother’s hand and says, “It is your motherhood/And not the daughter I’m buying.” The soldier is trying to be comforting to the mother, essentially letting her know that he is sorry that she is in this situation and that he will take good care of her daughter. This poem does not have many comforting moments, so I find it mildly touching and slightly ironic that a soldier (of all people) tries to console her in this moment. Perhaps one of the most heart-touching aspects of this poem is what the mother does with the 100 won. It can also be summed up by the first line in the last stanza which reads, “A mother she was.” With the 100 won, the mother did not buy herself food or medicine to combat her illness, instead she ran to the store and bought her daughter some bread. He nurturing, motherly qualities made her daughter her top priority in her life. Jin-Sung finishes the poem with more repetition of the line that was in the first stanza, recalling the scene of the exhausted mother in the market, but distinguishes the difference between before and after by the last line “And she wailed.” This line holds great significance because it holds a major shift. Before the mother attempted to stay strong for her daughter and held in her tears, whereas when her daughter finally leaves it is clear that she lets her emotions go where her daughter once stood. I chose this poem solely based on its title, and I did not realize the heart wrenching story associated with it. Jang Jin-Sung did a good job bringing attention to the lifestyle of the working class in North Korea, a problem many of us just skim over when we think about the country as a whole. He is trying to bring change to the human horrors of individuals who face situations like the one discussed in the poem. Jang Jin-Sung is an advocate for the people of North Korea, and if anyone is interested in his story, an interview with him can be found here: http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk02500&num=3611
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“Late February”
Ted Kooser https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/42621 I decided to write this poem in celebration of it being the end of February (and because it is about 75 degrees outside, holla). “Late February” by Ted Kooser is a poem about winter slowly transitioning into spring. The end takes a MAJOR shift that caught me completely off guard when I first read the poem. However, the shift is significant because it drives home Kooser’s point that spring tends to approach very dramatically some years, and it helps show that the stark difference between the brisk days of winter to the sunny days of spring could not be more unpredictable. In the first four lines of the poem, Kooser mentions that it is the “first warm day” and “the snow is no more.” This reveals that the area Kooser is talking about has been a cold, wintery environment up until now. Kooser wrote, “through the heaviest drifts/ rise autumn’s fallen/ bicycles, small carnivals/ of paint and chrome.” Bicycles and carnival rides that have not been used since the fall are now being utilized again for the joy they bring to their riders. Kooser is emphasizing the fact that spring and summer allow for people to enjoy the outdoors more, because the weather is more bearable than in winter. The lines “now children/ stiffened by winter/ and dressed, somehow/ like old men” refer to how kids, dressed in multiple layers of sweaters and coats, resemble old men. (Note: Kooser probably added this random line because of his own personal opinion. For some reason when he thinks of old men he thinks of grandpas dressed in multiple layers of clothing with coats and scarves, and that is a-ok. Just a nice reminder that when you are writing poetry, it is ok to make it personal and add your own viewpoint or silly line, it makes it more interesting! And now that I have drifted completely off topic...) The poem now takes a shift to a more interesting aspect--February nights. Kooser wrote, “But such a spring is brief/ by five o’clock/ the chill of sundown....” Just like Virginia is experiencing right now, February is an odd month because it has variable weather. One week there will be a blizzard, and the next it will be 80 degrees outside. The setting Kooser is trying to describe are those February days where it is uncharacteristically warm, and children can wear shorts and and drivers can roll their windows down. Now, for the ULTIMATE shift, Kooser wraps up his poem with the lines “the body of a farmer/ missing since fall/ will show up/ in his garden tomorrow/ as unexpected/ as a tulip.” It took me a while to realize that he was talking about finding a murdered body in a field. And, not only does Kooser go from talking about lovely, sunny, warm February days to a dead body in the middle of a corn field, but he even goes as far to compare finding the body to finding a tulip! Why does he do this? What is the point of this flabbergasting shift from what was a nice poem? I’ll tell ya why! Kooser cleverly added in his startling end to symbolize the dramatic oncoming of spring/the dramatic end of winter. This poem might be my new favorite from Ted Kooser, because of his clever word play. The whole poem up to the last few lines describe the beautiful, albeit quick, onset of spring to replace winter. He describes children coming out to play and snow melting on the ground. The last few lines are an astonishing, dark finish to the poem that I did not expect. In a way, his whole poem is an allegory for what he was trying to describe (did that just make any sense?). I hope that Kooser’s poem inspires all of you to take a moment to ask yourselves if spring is already here for where you live. After all, it is “Late February”....(well now it is the beginning of March, but what I am asking still applies). “The Giant Slide”
Ted Kooser https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/42634 “The Giant Slide” by Ted Kooser is a poem that creates feelings of nostalgia for childhood memories through descriptive imagery and enjambment. It describes an old slide on an abandoned playground and describes the speaker’s distant memories of when they once experienced enlightenment when playing on a similar playground. Kooser begins his poem by describing the decrepit state of a dilapidated slide by the side of a highway. He wrote, “with its rusty undulations lifts/ out of the weeds. It hasn’t been used/ for a generation.” Kooser is trying to describe how old the slide has become after years of nobody utilizing it for its purpose. He could also be referring to how old the speaker has become. By describing the slide as one that is deserted and broken down, Kooser essentially established that the speaker of the poem has not been on a slide, or any other sort of playground equipment, in years and is probably an adult. The slide does not seem to be alone in its deteriorating state, for Kooser also described a beat-up ticket booth next to it. Kooser then wrote, “A chain link fence keeps out/ the children and drunks.” The scene Kooser is trying to set is of an old, dusty, raggedy playground that has not been touched in years and is isolated from the rest of the world. Kooser is trying to emphasize how isolated the speaker is from his memories and his childhood and even uses a chain link fence to emphasize that barrier. Kooser’s message becomes clear in the next line when he makes a shift in the poem and writes, “Blue morning glories/ climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters/ of laughter.” The blue morning glories are small, blue flowers that add a sense of beauty and adventure into the poem. He also added words like “bright” and “laughter” to add a sense of liveliness and cheerfulness. This is a stark contrast from the deserted playground he had just been describing. These observations may even be symbols to represent the speaker’s feelings and the excitement he felt as a kid going on the slide. They represent relics of the speaker’s past that are brought up the longer he stares and remembers the playground. The next line, “Call it a passing fancy,/ this slide that nobody slides down now” conveys a sense that the speaker may feel like he/she is missing out on something. They also might be feeling a twinge of guilt or regret seeing the slide like that, to remind them that no one has taken care of it or maintained its quality. Kooser then wrote “Those screams have all gone east/ on a wind that will never stop blowing.” This could symbolize that all the children who had once played on the slide have moved away and presumably grown up. It is also assumed that the speaker is standing somewhere in the west coast, for Kooser describes the wind rolling over the Rockies and over the great plains. He ends the poem when he writes “where things catch on for a little while,/ bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.” The second to last line wraps up his message of the speaker reminiscing about their childhood, but Kooser also makes a point to say that things change. Once upon a time, kids thought that it was fun to go and play on the playground and go down the slide. Now, the slide is deserted and all the children have grown up. “The Giant Slide” is not just a poem about childhood memories, it is also a poem about how we grow away from them, and how they may seem isolated and reserved in our minds. The speaker of the poem feels nostalgic upon recollecting what that they once thought was an enjoyable experience in their childhood. Though the slide is described as rusty and surrounded by weeds, it is also given a sense of wonder by the blue morning glories preserving its once glorious nature. Things change and people change and Kooser is trying to convey the message to live in the moment and preserve and enjoy the events and people important in life right now. “Flying at Night”
Ted Kooser http://www.tedkooser.net/excerpts/flyingAtNight.html Ted Kooser’s poem, “Flying at Night” is, ironically, about lights, not a plane as I had at first expected. This poem is similar to his other works in the sense that he remains very metaphorical and incorporates the beauty of space. His poem is not very long, only eight lines, so I will try to go as in depth as I can with it. The beginning line, “Above us stars. Beneath us, constellations” at first, seems to provide the celestial planet of earth as a visual, surrounded by both stars and constellations in the depth of space. However, as I read on, I can see that Kooser has a different visual in mind that will only make sense by the last line. The next couple of lines, “Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies/ like a snowflake falling on water” is Kooser’s description of a supernova. A supernova is the explosion of a dying star that often happens millions of light years away from earth itself. It is interesting because he compares it to a snowflake falling on water. What good is this? As it turns out, Kooser is simply trying to make a point through this simile to say that even though supernovas constantly explode around us, we cannot feel it (because earth is too far away to receive any significant effects). To us, a supernova is just as gentle as a snowflake falling on water. We may feel the tiny ripples, but they will be unnoticeable and insignificant. Kooser’s next few lines are, “some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death/ snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn/ back into the little system of his care.” Kooser provides a contrast here between the immense, radiant explosion of a supernova and a farmer’s small light. We cannot feel the effects of a supernova, but we can see the farmer’s light, even though it is much less powerful. The last line in the poem says, “All night, the cities, like shimmering novas/ tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.” I think what Kooser is trying to explain here, is that the farmer’s light is rather insignificant, like the supernova to the farmer, compared to the city’s lights. The farmer’s light is swallowed up by the radiance of the entire city, so that you can no longer distinguish which one is his. Referring back to the first line, that is why I think Kooser was not talking about earth as a planet, but rather some object (whether it be a plane or a bird) flying over a city. Above us, there are stars, but below us there are constellations. It only seems this way because the lights from a city undermine the brightness of the stars, so a person can no longer feel the effects of the alluring night sky. Maybe this was Kooser’s reason for writing this poem. He was explaining the frustration that any stargazer who lives in a city feels. The stunning, mysterious night sky cannot be seen or felt through the incandescence of a bustling city. However, as Kooser wrote, flying at night over a city looks like a constellation in itself and anyone who stargazes will not be disappointed. “The Witness”
Ted Kooser https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=35644 When I first read “The Witness” I was enveloped in a mysterious, unsettling aura. The woman on trial seemed calm, cool, and collected despite the atmosphere. Court rooms to me always seem to have an air of desperation, either to prove for or against a case. This contrast between the woman and the courtroom played on my sense of setting. The cool demeanor of the woman later makes sense at the end of the poem, although it takes some digging and interpreting to find out why. Kooser wrote a powerful last line because it revealed to me the mystery behind the whole poem. The first line in the first stanza mentions that the woman is in front of a divorce judge. Here, the reader can assume that the woman is a witness in her divorce case. What makes the first stanza particularly interesting, though, is the connotation Kooser uses. For instance, he uses phrases such as, "best dress," "smooth," "white bouquets," "veil of lace," and "kiss of the sunlit windows." These phrases are related to the joys and atmosphere of weddings. This is interesting because the woman is currently standing in front of a divorce judge, a task that is usually dismal. The second stanza is the unsettling one. Kooser uses several similes and metaphors to describe what happened in the relationship between the man and the woman. What Kooser wrote about the lake can be interpreted many different ways, but my mind saw the darkness in the situation. When he wrote, "where years have sunk and settled to the floor" I took it as the wife murdered her husband and threw his body into the lake. Kooser then used a metaphor to relate the voices in the courtroom to boats rubbing against a dock. This may be an effect of the action on the wife's subconscious. The last line in the poem is designated as the most significant one because Kooser gives it its own stanza. It shows that the wife committed the murder and is about to go in front of the court to lie about it. It holds no remorse- it's very solid and shows that the woman has thought a great deal about the situation at hand. "The Witness" is a classic example of suspense. When I first read the poem, I did not realize what the woman had done, but re-reading it over again led me to believe that the wife was the murderer of her husband. In it, Kooser adds feelings of nostalgic, good-old sweetheart times but takes a dark turn in the last few lines. This poem displays the dark side of love that is often unseen. “Selecting A Reader”
Ted Kooser http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/selecting-a-reader/ “Selecting A Reader” is a poem about Kooser’s vision of his ideal reader. It is about a beautiful girl, who upon seeing Kooser’s work, picks it up, reads it, and becomes inspired. Her beauty is downplayed, though, by the decrepit, filthy coat she wears in the poem that she cannot afford to get cleaned. So, does this mean that his perfect reader is a beautiful, poverty-stricken girl? Also, what is it about his work that leaves the woman so motivated to change her lifestyle all of a sudden? There are many hidden messages in this poem that lie waiting to be uncovered. I chose this particular poem to analyze because I thought it was interesting how Kooser allusioned to his own poetry through the lines ”and walking carefully up on my poetry” and “she will thumb/over my poems.” Of course, this makes perfect sense because Kooser is describing his perfect reader, but it is not common for an author to break the fourth wall. Also, there must be something that the girl reads through his poems that inspires her to get her coat cleaned, so let’s turn our eyes over to the girl for a second. As I said before, Kooser described the girl as “beautiful”. She walked in “at the loneliest moment of an afternoon” meaning she was alone with no prior obligations. Kooser wrote, “her hair still damp at the neck/from washing it” which implies that she just gotten out of the shower. Her hair could still be damp because she did not put much thought into her appearance. This line was followed by “she should be wearing/a raincoat, an old one, dirty/ from not having enough money for the cleaners.” Even though the woman was beautiful, she may not have been wealthy because she could not even afford to have her coat cleaned. It then says, “She will take out her glasses.” This little detail is interesting, because it does not seem significant, but Kooser added it in for a reason--possibly to describe the woman’s imperfections. After flipping through Kooser’s book of poems, she sets his book down and says, “For that kind of money, I can get/my raincoat cleaned.” What does this mean exactly? Why would she say something like that after reading one of his poems? Perhaps, more importantly, why would Kooser want her to say something like that? It seems like all of a sudden, the woman notices her outward appearance and decides to change it. The last line in the poem is undoubtedly the most significant-- “And she will.” Kooser used this sentence fragment as a sentence to create emphasis. Emphasis that the woman will now clean her coat for she is determined. But why the sudden change in heart? Well, all the reader can assume is that Kooser’s poetry did that to her. Kooser picked this unkempt woman because he knew that he could change her with the magic of his words. That is why the woman is Kooser’s favorite reader--she was moved by his poetry and started to notice and act on the world around her. I have not yet read all of Kooser’s poems, nor am I an expert in any of his works. However, I do hope to revisit this poem sometime later in the year just to see how the nature of his work could have affected the woman. Is it because his work supports the details, emphasizes beauty, or is it because it persuades the reader to make a change in the world? This is something I am excited to start looking into once I have a solid stack of his endless supply of poems marked and analyzed. Feel free to leave a comment about what you think the goal of his work is. I would love to hear opinions! “After Years”
Ted Kooser http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/after-years/ In this poem, Ted Kooser describes the tumultuous feeling of love. A person, who will be presumed a man for the sake of this post, is said to have seen his lover walking from a distance. It does not say this directly in the poem, but I think the man has not seen this woman in a long time for the work is titled, “After Years.” This poem is probably the most ambiguous, heart-wrenching poem I have ever read. You can tell Kooser is meticulous with the examples he gives of nature because each one specifically applies to the man’s emotions. For example, after the man sees the woman Kooser wrote, “without a sound, the glittering face of the glacier fell into the sea.” This can be interpreted as the man’s heart dropped at the sight of his lover’s face. I would imagine not seeing your lover after many years would get your stomach doing some cartwheels. The next example Kooser gave of nature was, “An ancient oak fell in the Cumberlands, holding only a handful of leaves.” This example seems more like a melancholic metaphor, because imagine--a tree that has been standing for years, centuries even, finally falling with a loud boom on its weak trunk that has diminished in both color and strength. The once young, mighty tree now only has feeble branches and a few leaves adorning its sides. This example must appeal to the man’s sense of sorrow, which leads me to think that something happened between him and the woman he’s looking at. Did she hurt him in some way? Did he hurt her? In order to understand the man’s feelings, we must dig deeper. Kooser’s next metaphor is, “an old woman scattering corn to her chickens looked up for an instant.” This example is oddly specific, and if I am going to be honest, I am not quite sure what it stands for. There are many allusions to this specific setting, so maybe the relationship the man and the woman had before their breakup was a kind one? Kind enough to catch the attention of a sweet old lady? Kooser’s last metaphor, and distinctly my favorite because I am an astronomy buff, is, “a star thirty-five times the size of our own exploded and vanished.” This supernova of mass proportion can relate to the man’s intense sense of love. A supernova is bright, hot, fast, and powerful- not unlike the feeling of love. It is there one second and gone the next. Now, it is safe to assume that something drastic happened between the man and the woman- something that caused them to leave each other within a few days. Kooser wrapped up the poem by saying an astronomer saw the green flash of the supernova, “as he stood on the great open dome of my heart with no one to tell.” Through this metaphor, I figure that the man and the woman are no longer on speaking terms, haven’t been for years, and it would be odd for him to confess his love to her out of nowhere. This could be a tale about first love, and seeing that special person later on in life--how the man craves to express his affection for this woman to the world, but just can’t. It’s too late. |
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