Abstract: By rereading some meaningful texts in contemporary Korean American poetry, this essay aims to address, on several fronts, the critical notion of emptiness in Buddhism and Daoism in the interplay of words and space. Sun Yung Shin’s experiments with Korean alphabets in her poems stand out in the way that they become the aesthetic field where emptiness and thingness actively take part in the process of creating a thought pause. Here, emptiness is not just a blank space on a page. It forms a temporal-spatial site for thought as an alternative space where readers are invited to see how every singular thing is related to every other thing. This essay connects the various uses of grammatical and structural ellipsis and paratactical construction in Korean American Experimental Poetics with the notion of “emptiness, kong,空.” As a web of interpenetrated all things, the typographical space in Sun Yung Shin’s poems forces the reader to experience the thought pause and to intuitively perceive things-as-they-are and the embodiment of ontological possibilities of any-(no)-thing.

Key words: Korean American poetry, thought pause, emptiness, thingness, Sun Yung Shin, Skirt Full of Black