Choe Jeongrye


Choe Jeongrye was a modern South Korean poet.

Biography

Choe Jeongrye was born in 1955 in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea. She graduated with a doctorate degree in Korean poetry from Korea University. She participated in the as a poet at University of Iowa in 2006 and stayed one year at University of California, Berkeley as a visiting writer in 2009. Her poems have been printed in Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poets, Iowa Review, Text Journal, World Literature Today, and various Korean and Japanese literary magazines. An English-language collection, Instances, was published in 2011. Choe was a lecturer at Korea University.
She died in 2021 from cerebral hemorrhage after having been diagnosed a year earlier with hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, a rare blood disease.

Work

Many of Choe's poems were about time and memory. She typically used fragments of time and memory as tools for looking into others and the world, or for identifying herself. What ultimately emerged from her exploration of fragmented memories and chaos of time was the sense of emptiness and loneliness: the core of existence.
Choe's poetic language was straightforward and condensed. She used simple language, subverting plain words to make them unfamiliar and strange. In Instances, her work is described as having:
Choe received several awards for her writing, including the Baekseok Literature Prize, Midang Literary Award, and Ojangwhan Literature Prize.

Works in translation

Instances: Selected Poems, translated by Wayne de Fremery, Brenda Hillman, and Choe Jeongrye

Works in Korean (partial)

A Forest of Bamboo in My Ear Tigers in the Sunlight Crimson Field Lebanese Emotion Kangaroo is Kangaroo I am I Ditch is Dragon's Hometown
  • ''Light Net''

Awards