Kim Hyesoon and Paul Muldoon — Exploring Reality from Unconventional Angles
South Korean feminist poet Kim Hyesoon and Irish Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon present their work in a shared reading at the Purcell Room.
Why we picked this
Kim Hyesoon's grotesque feminist surrealism and Paul Muldoon's densely allusive Irish wit operate on completely different frequencies — which is precisely what makes sharing a stage at Poetry International interesting: two poets who reached the outer edges of the form by entirely opposite routes.
Kim Hyesoon is one of the most influential poets in contemporary South Korean literature, and her work is uncompromising in ways that can feel disorienting before they feel clarifying. Her poems work through the body, through myth, through feminist rage and formal strangeness — she has described her work as an attempt to find what language cannot contain and then press toward it anyway. Her collections, translated into English by Don Mee Choi, have been recognised with the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and she has built a reputation among poets internationally as someone genuinely expanding what the form can do.
Paul Muldoon is one of the most decorated Irish poets of his generation — a Pulitzer Prize winner whose work is dense with allusion, wordplay, and a kind of controlled wildness that manages to feel both erudite and instinctual. He was Professor of Poetry at Oxford and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker; his range runs from tight formal poems to sprawling lyric sequences. Where Hyesoon operates through the body and image, Muldoon operates through language itself — through the sounds of words, their etymologies, their doubles and shadows.
The pairing is part of the Southbank Centre’s Poetry International Festival, a three-day gathering that has been bringing international poets to London since the 1960s. The description — “explore reality from unconventional angles” — is understatement; both of these poets have spent careers examining what reality looks like when you refuse the conventional view.