Word: koreanness
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...whole, however, Ohno has been extraordinarily lucky in the Olympics. During the 2002 Games in Salt Lake City, Kim Dong-sung from South Korea crossed the finish line first in the 1,500-meter race. Ohno trailed behind him, and finished second. After Dong-sung started waving the Korean flag during his victory lap, the judges disqualified him for blocking Ohno. South Korea was furious, and took out their frustration on the American. Ohno received death threats. (Watch a video of future Olympians in Vancouver...
...salvaged from our suffering/ Is not in the shadowy hands of our religious philosophies/ But in the charge of stars, flowers/ & the blaze of autumn color," he writes in "Crimson Leaves," also from Abiding Places. The poem describes the annual turning of maples across the entirety of the Korean peninsula, from the Tumen River bordering China to Naejang Mountain in Ko's native North Jeolla province and on to Cheju Island. By early December, when I arrive at Naejang Mountain to trace Ko's footsteps up Seoraebong Peak, the famed red foliage - for Ko an arboreal emblem of a unified...
During the Korean War, Ko was forced to cart away corpses. After, he became a Buddhist monk and wandered over the vales and hills of South Korea, a "nation of unending waves!" For 10 years he lived off alms, often sleeping in graveyards and caves. He also published his first poems, which he has since likened to "tufts of grass among the ruins" of the fratricidal war - a typically earthy metaphor for a poet derided by his detractors as artless and quaintly rustic. The landscapes in his poems are undeniably folksy. Villagers get drunk on bootleg makgeolli - the milky, fizzy...
That complex, known as Seodaemun under the Japanese who built it in 1907 to incarcerate Korean independence fighters, and where Ko spent much time for his leading role in protests against successive military governments in the 1970s and '80s, has been turned into a museum of horrors, a red-brick Grand Guignol of simulated torture chambers as chilling as Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh or Changi in Singapore. To visit is upsetting but essential if you're to see Korea the Ko Un way - that is, an experience of harmonious extremes, a bracing yin and yang of Buddhas and booze...
...sandwiched between Kim Jong Il and South Korea's late President Kim Dae Jung, the friend and former jail mate for whom Ko penned an encomium included in Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), his 30-volume magnum opus profiling everyone he's ever met, as well as figures from Korean folklore and history. The three are toasting each other at a state banquet during the first Reunification Summit in Pyongyang in June 2000, during which Ko recited "At the Taedong River," an occasional poem that reportedly much moved the fearless Dear Leader. An earlier piece, written after a ramble around...