Thinking Window Verses

Kim Ryŏ's Thinking Window Verses is a remarkable work of memory and imagination, a diaristic compendium of the people and places the poet encountered at the turn of the 19th century in Puryŏng, a town near the northern border, where he served the first of two five-year terms of exile. It was during his second term, in the southeastern port of Chinhae that he wrote three hundred poems. The poems are composed of Chinese characters and each poem has twelve phrases and begins with the question: "I ask, what do you think / of our beloved northern seaside?" The various answers he provides reveal a surprisingly modern sensibility, a clear-eyed vision of a world he came to love, notwithstanding his loneliness and despair. For Kim Ryŏ was an uncommonly empathetic figure, he took the measure of the people he met and transformed his experiences with them into poetry for the ages.

Kim Ryŏ (1766-1822) is a poet and prose writer in the late Chosŏn period. He is generally regarded as a pioneer of essay on minor subjects along with Yi Ok. He has several publications including Thinking Window Verses, Report on the Strange Fish of Chinhae and The Song of Pangju. His penname is Tamjŏng and his works are published in The Collected Works of Tamjŏng.

Won-Chung Kim is a professor of English Literature at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, Korea, where he teaches contemporary American poetry, ecological literature, and translation. Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. Hyeonwu Lee is a specialist in classical Korean literature written in Chinese characters. She has translated many classical writers into modern Korean.