From Red to Green: Reading Ecological Poetry With Kim Uk-dong

I read Kim Uk-dong in my last semester at college, in a course on ecological literature. We had to pick a Korean poem and an American one and compare how they thought about the natural world. Two pages sounded manageable until I had to decide what I was looking for in each poem.

What an Ecological Critic Notices

Kim begins with the Titanic as a way to think about a planet whose passengers cannot simply get off. Later he reads ecological poetry, asking when a poem makes a reader notice a relationship rather than simply repeating a message about protecting nature. I liked his discussion of Oh Kyu-won’s children’s poem “Road” for that reason. He also writes about Thoreau and Walden, a book I had already read from a different angle.

One argument stayed with me even where I was unsure I agreed. Kim considers Saussure’s idea that the bond between a sound and its meaning is conventional. He asks whether the sound of namu, the Korean word for a tree, can feel closer to what it names than a general account of language would suggest. A feeling learned through years of speaking a language can be powerful without establishing a universal connection between sound and object.

Two Poems, Two Ways of Seeing a Cycle

For my assignment I chose Jeong Hyeon-jong’s “Cloud Seeds” and Gary Snyder’s “Ripples on the Surface.” Jeong follows a chain from life in the sea to clouds and rain. It made me think about how distant things can depend on each other without a person setting the process in motion. Snyder begins from observing water and animals in motion. In his image of a small house in the wild, I see a human dwelling contained in something much larger.

Their poems also use different kinds of language to reach that point. Jeong brings the vocabulary of biology and weather into a passage that thinks of clouds as part of the body. Snyder’s words make the house and the wild exchange places. The images are doing more than dressing up an argument. They offer a way to experience a connection before turning it into an explanation.

I began with an assignment about two poets. What I took from Kim’s book was the idea that a poem can make the scale of an ordinary thing change. A cloud can belong to the sea and to someone’s dinner. A house can belong to the wild even while its owner thinks of it as shelter from the wild.