Teaching sijo in America

By Mark Peterson

I wrote last time about the Sejong Cultural Society based in Chicago and their annual fundraiser. Today I want to write about their annual teachers' workshop for American teachers to learn how to teach sijo in American classrooms. The workshop was a huge success with teachers attending from all across America.

The daylong seminar was held in Indianapolis, Indiana, and co-sponsored by Indiana University. There were teachers from California, Maryland, Georgia ― east coast, west coast ― and all around the Midwest. Teachers were given sessions on various aspects of sijo, were taught how to write sijo, and shown comparisons to Chinese jueju (quatrain poetry) and Japanese haiku. The culmination of the day's activities was a sijo-writing contest for the teachers.

The Sejong Cultural Society deserves great credit for planting sijo in America. The sijo is the format, a three-line poem, but the language is English. For 11 years now the Sejong Cultural Society has sponsored an online contest for American high school students (although there are some primary school students who enter as well). Beginning this past year, they started a new division ― for adults, post-secondary students and non-students. This past year there were over 1,000 high school students who entered the contest, and in its first year in the adult division there were dozens of entries.

Sijo is finding success in English in America.

The student sijo can be remarkably mature and insightful. But the new adult division is producing some deeply touching and powerful sijo. And some cleverly humorous sijo. Here are some examples. Maybe some of these will inspire some of the readers of this column to try writing a sijo and entering the contest.

The winner in the adult division is Lily Daniels, a sophomore at Old Dominion University who entered the contest because she saw a flyer posted on a bulletin board!

Abandoned
This window reveals mysteries.
Behind glass, a life that would have been.
As I fade from your memory,
You grow clearer in my mirror.
Mom, Dad, do you search each other's faces
For the girl you threw away?

The poem is highly personal. She was adopted to an American family from China. She reported on her bio after the announcement that she had won: "The inspiration for my sijo comes from my personal experience. I was left outside of a Family Planning Commission building in China when I was one week old. Even though I love my adoptive family and remember nothing about my first year, it was difficult for me to come to terms with being adopted. There are so many unanswerable questions about my past. Writing is one of the ways I wrestle with these questions and grow from my experiences. I hope that by sharing my writing others are able to understand and relate to my perspective."

The second-place poem was written by Kaitlyn Jurewicz, a high school English teacher who loves dancing ― as you can see in the poem. This was her first sijo.

Rain Dance
Without fear, I offer myself to the darkening sky.
I dare to wear her delicate, silver teardrops as my crown.
Through the storm, I close my eyes and I dance and dance and dance.

The third-place poem in a humorous vein captures one of the images of our modern cellphone age. It was written by a 1.5-generation Korean American, Ha Young Shin, who is a financial analyst and part-time MBA student. She didn't know what a sijo was before this competition.

Contemporary Love
Swiping left, then left left right
Judging faces without a thought
Seeking love that fills the heart
Oh could you be, my Mr. Right?
Marriage bells ring left right left right
For the fifth time this minute

The student winner this year is a senior from Syracuse, New York, who thanks her teacher for the impetus to enter the contest. This is her third year in the competition, and she came up a winner. Her poem is touching, revealing the honesty of a student who doesn't have parental support in their school activities.

Absentee Parents
Make their excuses when asked why they aren't at your concert.
Pat yourself on the back when you see others holding bouquets.
You have become your own cheerleader. This is a crucial skill.

The second-place winner in the student category was an 11th grader from New Jersey by the name of Hye In Lee who knows Korean culture and wrote a sijo that is very much in line with today's #MeToo movement.

A Kisaeng's Sijo
With the rhythm of the janggu, we dance like magpies,
Iridescent and spinning, hoping for freedom from the men
And their hands feeling at our ivory ankles, calves, and thighs.

Visit sejongculturalsociety.org to find other winners. The future will hold even more treasures of sijo in America. And I can't help but wish, as a closing thought, that the Korean education institution will start to teach the writing of sijo for now sijo is only taught as an ancient and dead art. There are more sijo written in America than in Korea. It's a sad fact, but true.

Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.