Poetry reading: Kim Yideum & Athena Farrokhzad

Kim Yideum (1969, South Korea) believes the way history is generally presented is too neat and tidy. Where are the courtesans, why does no one talk about the women who chose a different life? In her poems she seeks out the darker sides of life, the places and events that are not usually talked about. Figures brush up against each other in dark alleyways, never shying away from the physical reality of contact. The body is sometimes dirty, wet and sticky, and it is precisely this imperfect state that Kim Yideum describes, attentively and full of wonder, so vividly that it can almost make the reader uncomfortable. Some poems are brief, gentle and romantic, while others are as muddled as monologues delivered by an unreliable narrator, brimming with contradictions. While her characters are sometimes listless, yearning for scandal and adventure, Yideum always manages to grab and hold the attention of her readers and listeners.

The work of poet, playwright, translator and literary critic Athena Farrokhzad (1983, Sweden/Iran) boils with rage, but it also resonates with concern, as one constantly gives way to the other. She believes that stories are the only legacy that really matters. Family therefore plays a key role in her work, as in her extraordinary collection White Blight, in which a family confronts the past in conversations about memories, revenge and language. In the poem Letter to a Warrior, written to her unborn daughter, Farrokhzad considers what it means to create new life, to feel it in you and to contemplate the lives that went before. Rage is also a dominant emotion in Europe, Where Have You Misplaced Love?, a collection of poems that can be read as a call to action to take better care of each other. Above all, however, they remind us never to stop telling stories.

Host: Elfie Tromp