Work samples

  • Her Head Bowed
    Her Head Bowed
    This poem appeared in A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, published by The University of Akron Press.
  • The First Mother
    The First Mother
    This poem was first published in the journal Eleven Eleven. It is inspired by a Korean folktale and is a part of my first book manuscript.
  • notfarmers.jpg
    notfarmers.jpg
    We're Not Farmers was first published in Tin House, then selected for their 10th anniversary poetry anthology Satellite Convulsions.
  • The Village
    The Village
    This poem appeared in the summer 2020 issue of Pleiades literary magazine. It was part of a folio of Korean-American women poets, curated by E. J. Koh.

About Diana

Baltimore County
Diana Park teaches high school English. She is interested in folktales as vehicles of cultural values and archetypes. She holds degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and Arizona State University. She is a recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, Fulbright South Korea, and MacDowell. Her work has appeared in journals including Tin House and Pleiades.

Poems from my first book manuscript, More Snow than Rice

I’m working on my first book of poetry, More Snow than Rice. It’s a lyric narrative of a heroine’s journey through an imaginary country scarred by war.
 
The original form of the book was a long poem following the heroine through villages, forests, and mountains as she invented an identity apart from a dutiful daughter. Now the book is a collection of poems: a depiction of a lonely girlhood preceding an adventure through a snowy landscape. The search for a whole self and a home poses a greater challenge than survival. The roles of women, especially as mothers and daughters, are sometimes a greater challenge than the brutality of war. While drafting and revising poems, I wonder how women shape and embody spaces—interior selves, familial roles, kitchens, trees, and on the page. I explore how a woman is defined through a lens influenced by Korean folktales, for these tales preserve and convey cultural values.

I began this project when I was living in Seoul as a Fulbright fellow. However, I stopped writing for several years to focus on teaching high school students and caring for my parents, who struggle with medical and financial issues. I started to write again by attending the June 2019 Kundiman Retreat, an intensive five-day writing workshop. Now I'm determined to complete this book.

  • CIMG0053.jpg
    CIMG0053.jpg
    A pond in the royal palace Gyeongbokgung, taken during my Fulbright year in South Korea

Additional Poems from More Snow than Rice

Here are four more poems from my poetry manuscript, More Snow than Rice.

I wasn't sure how to add more poems to my first project, so I created a new one. I wanted to add these poems to create more context for these poems as a collection. 
  • More from More Snow than Rice.pdf

Korean Literary Translations of Kim Hyesun

Now I'm an ajumma (middle-aged woman) but not an umma (mother) and a caretaker for my elderly parents. Kim Hyesun’s poetry resonates with me, because she shares my resistance to the traditional roles of Korean women. She creates a language for women with no identity and all of them in a patriarchal society. She subverts traditional expectations about Korean women and their poetry, writing poems that are surreal, violent, and not “pretty.” In “Conservative Seoul Rats,” a mother kills and eats her children. Yet, Kim does not renounce female roles like motherhood. She strives to change or reflect how women really view them. 

I have been translating poems from Kim Hyesun’s Sad Love Machine. I love how a line is open to possibilities in another language. It feels like unwrapping a well-packaged present for everyone to share.
  • Literary Translations_Diana Park.pdf