Ko Un's Songs for Tomorrow now available from Green Integer

SONGS FOR TOMORROW: A Collection of Poems 1961 - 2001
by Ko Un


Green Integer 170 978-1-933382-70-8 $15.95



To be a leading poet in Korea is equivalent to a sports celebrity, music idol, and superstar rolled into one. In February 2009, Green Integer (Los Angeles) has published a 300-page edition of poems by Ko Un, Korea's unofficial poet laureate. This work spans forty years of his poetry, in English, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé, Young Moo-Kim, and Gary Gach. This will be his de facto "collected" poems (scare quotes, given that the poet's output in Korean exceeds 140 volumes), representing the incredible breadth and depth of his major periods, themes, and genres. To read this work is to appreciate much of modern Korean history and culture in microcosm, in which the author has not just been a bystander but rather an active participant. His is both a powerful voice of the indomitable human spirit, and a particular messenger from one of the underappreciated civilizations of Eastsia.


Ko Un was born 1933 in Kunsang in southwestern Korea. During Japanese occupation, he learned to write Korean in secret. Following the Korean War, he became a monk, and included some of his poems as filler in the Buddhist newspaper he founded, where they caught the critical recognition of Midang. After rising to high rank in the Buddhist order — including a pilgrimage by foot across his wartorn homeland — the poet renounced the monastic life. Struggling with despair that gripped the nation following colonial occupation, war, and national division, he spent the next decade teaching in a charity school on Cheju Island. He then gave up nihilism for activism as he went on to spearhead artists and writers opposed to the dictatorial military regimes that had taken power. Following this, he married, raised a family, and settled into the mature period of his literary output. Nominated for a Nobel several times, in June of 2008 he was awarded the Griffin Trust Lifetime Achievement Recognition for Excellence in Poetry. He still continues his activism, working on both sides of the DMZ, nurturing apt conditions for unification.


Prof Choi Won-Shik writes: "The unique space where anti-traditional Modernism and anti-western Traditionalism meet is where the poetry of Ko Un originates." In his last published prose text, Allen Ginsberg called Ko Un "Bodhisattva of Korean poetry, exuberant, demotic, abundant, obsessed with poetic creation … a magnificent poet, combination of Buddhist cognoscente, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian." Lawrence Ferlinghetti, introducing Ko Un at a world poetry festival in Greece, hailed him as "Korea's greatest living Zen poet." Pulitzer Prize-winner Gary Snyder states, "Ko Un outfoxes the Old Masters and the Young poets both." Kyoto Review has said, "he is able to see from a bird's-eye view, all perspectives, without superimposing any judgment." Poet Jane Hirshfield writes: "Ko Un's poems live amid the democracy of all being, looking directly and with great pleasure at this very moment's bright-leaping essence." And Robert Hass has hailed his work Maninbo as "one of the most extraordinary projects in world literature."


Previous literary translations of Ko Un's poetry by this distinguished trio include Ten Thousand Lives (165 poems from the first 10 volumes of Maninbo — now 25 volumes, with one poem each for every person the poet's ever known), with introduction by Poet Laureate Emeritus Robert Hass (Green Integer, 2nd printing), and Flowers of a Moment (illustrated), 185 brief poems Northern California Book Award for Translation (2007). Some of these translations have previously been published in Americas Review, Brick, BuddhaDharma, Cafe Review, Calque, Crazyhorse, Drunken Boat, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Heart as Origami (Rising Fire Press), Inquiring Mind, Jacket, Lilipoh, Manoa, Mantis, Mutannabi Streets Starts Here (Red Hen Press), The Nation, New American Writing, New College Review, The New Yorker, nocturnes (re)view, Or, PEN America, Poetry Bay, Spirit of Change, Stony Thursday, To Topos Poetry International (Poverty Issue), Tricycle, Turning Wheel, Two Lines, Urthona, Witness, Words without Borders, World Literature Today, and Language for a New Century [Norton]



Gary Gach, one of the Ko Un translators, is available to read from and discuss Ko Un and this work. To hear him at the inaugural reading of Flowers of a Moment (25 minutes):http://www.redroom.com/audio/live-reading-gary-gach-ko-un-flowers-moment-ten-thousand-lives



To purchase this book, please send $17.95 ($15.95 + $2.00 postage) to Green Integer (douglasmesserli@gmail.com) through PayPal.com or contact me directly at douglasmesserli@gmail.com
You can also purchase Ten Thousand Lives through PayPal or through our website (www.greeninteger.com).



Green Integer can also pass on any requests for Gary Gach's readings and performances.