Abstract

This paper examines the trajectories of poetry after the feminism reboot by engaging Donna J. Haraway’s thought, with a focus on the modes and implications of “worlding-with” found in the poetry of Seong Da-young, Yu Gye-young, and Han Yeon- hee. In doing so, it explores how poetic engagements with non-human beings—one of the most salient developments in Korean poetry since the mid-to-late 2010s—have been meaningfully sustained and transformed. Across the works of these three poets, we encounter speakers who, grounded in a sense of guilt and critical reflection on a violent world, seek to build relationships with other beings and to practice world- ing-with. In Haraway’s terms, worlding-with becomes possible through the cultivation of “ response-ability” toward diverse critters on Earth, emerging from sympoietic entanglements. As the poetic speakers in the works of Seong Da-young, Yu Gye-young, and Han Yeon-hee attempt forms of becoming-with non-human others, they not only reflect critically on their own modes of existence but also enact ethical responsibility as a form of poetic practice. More specifically, Seong Da-young’s poetry foregrounds confessions and interrogations of anthropocentric violence; Yu Gye-young’s poetry portrays repeated, if often failed, attempts to become the other; and Han Yeon-hee’s poetry experiments with the possibility of commoning by sustaining the continuity of “ our” stories. The practices of worlding-with non-human others articulated in these poems are significant as forms of poetic practice after the feminism reboot, and they represent a meaningful current in Korean poetry since the mid-to-late 2010s.