Hyejung Kook

Grey Day

Bio: Hyejung Kook’s poetry appears in  Poem-a-Day, POETRY Magazine, Verse Daily, Shenandoah, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Hanging Loose, and elsewhere. Other works include essays in The Critical Flameand Poetry as Spellcasting (North Atlantic Books, 2023) and a chamber opera libretto. Hyejung is a Fulbright grantee and co-editor of Barahm Press, Her debut full-length poetry collection, Once Is Not Enough, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in Fall 2027. Born in Seoul, she now lives in Prairie Village, Kansas with her husband and their two children.

Website: https://hyejungkook.tumblr.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hyejungkook/

Statement:  My aim in "Cloud Processional" was to write a piece that both sonically and visually reflects the mesmerizing, slowly shifting quality of "Grey Day" and its soundtrack by Rare Blood. Something subtle and spacious, yet also dynamic and deeply moving.

I tried to create shapes with text that echoed the drifting contours of the clouds. Instead of simply reading left to right and up to down, the eye navigates lines that converge and diverge, language often repeating and changing slowly, sometimes only a letter at a time. At the beginning of the last section, there’s a ten-line stanza. Each line is six words, and with each new line, the last word of the previous line drops off and a new word appears in the initial position. It's a visually literal rendering of how cloud shapes disappear from one part of the video's frame while new shapes appear in another, but the stanza also demonstrates how much emotion and transformation can emerge from incremental changes. 

The dreamy quality of the video and the way Rare Blood uses pauses and slow harmonic progressions encouraged me to move associatively as well. My writing is very driven by sound, rhythm, and cadence. I’m also interested in repetition, variation polyphony, and translation. Korean, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon appear in the poem, as well as references to "Of Mere Being" by Wallace Stevens, "No worst, there is none" by John Donne, "The Wayfarer," an Anglo-Saxon poem, and Hardly War by Don Mee Choi. Just as the clouds in the video inspire both the content and form of the poem, musicality appears not simply as a mode of poetic movement but also in description, most evident in the second section about notes and intervals.

 I encourage readers to try reading "Cloud Processional" aloud while playing "Grey Day" so that you can hear the interplay of your own voice with my words, Rare Blood's evocative music, and Jim Vecchi's compelling visuals.