Kim Dong-ho’s Belly Button Record

I went back to the English department office at Sungkyunkwan University after some time away. I had an internship ahead of me after graduation, and the visit felt like a chance to say goodbye.

On the way out, I picked up a copy of a poetry collection the office was giving away. It was this book.

Belly Button Record, a Collection by Kim Dong-ho

Kim Dong-ho, born in 1934, was professor emeritus in the English department at Sungkyunkwan. He was approaching eighty when the book appeared in 2012.

It gathers poems by a writer with many years behind him. I seldom come across poetry in everyday life. A collection is the kind of book I rarely open unless I go looking for one.

Kim can put a few words together and give a clear picture of how people live, then turn the same few words into satire. There is an ease that comes with long experience, along with a willingness to say something sharp.

The poems can seem light at first and linger longer than expected. Of the ones I remember, this is the one I wanted to share.

Words, Words, Words

• Words never travel unchanged.
• They swell and swell and swell
• until they become a myth.
• They twist and twist and twist
• until they become slander.

• Things that breed in numbers
• are more than love between men and women.
• Men’s talk against other men breeds by the dozen.
• Women’s plots against other women breed by the dozen too.

• Those of you riding away on words,
• those of you galloping off at the races,
• you might as well ride an ox.
• Be the boy on its back, playing a flute.

Few Words, a Long Echo

I rarely read poetry, but it can deliver a forceful thought in very little space.

Simplicity often helps something stay in the memory. Reducing a thought to a few lines may be one of the surest ways of making it reach someone.

As an English literature student, I wrote poems as well, partly by choice and partly because the course required it. They had to be in English, which turned out to be part of the fun.

Since leaving university I have moved further away from poetry. Most of what I write now conveys information or records something I think, and the language I use for it rarely sounds like a poem.

I finish the book wondering whether, with a little room in my day, I could write something as short and as lasting as one of Kim’s poems.

Book Information

Belly Button Record: Poems by Kim Dong-ho

Author

Kim Dong-ho

Publication date

19 October 2012

ISBN13

9788960394735

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