Standing Up to Destiny:
Korean-American Poet Ed Bok Lee
when you’re singing karaoke, there are more important things than staying in tune; . . .
the only thing that really matters is . . .
Destiny
and how much you can affect it with the far end of your voice.
how much you can stand up to it . . .
Those lines appear near the beginning of award-winning poet Ed Bok Lee’s “Real Karaoke People,” and anyone who has spent any committed time in a noraebang has a pretty good idea of what he means. On December 4, Chonnam National University will host Mr. Lee for a reading and discussion sponsored by the University’s British and American Culture Research Center, the Department of English Language and Literature, and the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.
Lee has received high praise for his work from poets and critics alike. His first book, “Whorled” (Coffee House Press 2011), won an American Book Award and a Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. “Real Karaoke People” (New Rivers Press 2005) won an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Lee also writes plays and teaches creative writing at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul. In an interview on the Coffee House website, he describes his background: “I am an American poet, born of parents who lived through the Korean War—my mother from what is now the (communist) North, my father from what is now the (capitalist) South. I attended kindergarten in South Korea, grew up in North Dakota and Minnesota, and have lived, worked, and studied in America, South Korea, Russia and Kazakhstan.”
He says that his first book looks more to the past, while his second book looks more toward a globalized future, and not always happily. Both of those perspectives relate to his Korean heritage. “I have memories of a Third World Korea, from childhood, shanty towns, how the people acted, sounded, smelled, etc. Korea is now basically a First World nation, . . . I feel very compelled to try to make an artful document of this shift in consciousness, and then superimpose that on how I feel about globalization and, perhaps, ultimately, on the future of America.”