Park Sangsoon (born 1962) is a South Korean poet and publisher.
1. Life
Park Sangsoon was born in Seoul. He studied fine art painting at Seoul National University. He entered the literary publishing house Minumsa as an art director, eventually rising to editor-in-chief and CEO, where he oversaw the Minumsa World Literature series. He then joined the literary imprint Ppul of Woongjin Publishing, where he oversaw the Korean publication of Penguin Classics.
Park made his literary debut in 1991, publishing eight poems including "Railway to the Bread Factory" (빵공장으로 통하는 철도) in the spring issue of the quarterly Writer’s World. His collections of poems include 6 is a Tree, 7 is a Dolphin (6은 나무 7은 돌고래, 1993), Marana, Heroine of Smut Comics (마라나, 포르노 만화의 여주인공, 2017), Love Adagio (2004), and 200 Grams of Sad Potatoes (슬픈감자 200그램, 2017).
2. Writing
Park Sangsoon embarks on a new direction for Korean poetry with his avant-garde and exotic poems. Park is undoubtedly a modernist poet. He writes lyrical poems that pursue modernity. Park's poetry combines the two opposite values in a sophisticated way that reveals the unique personality of the poet. In any era, avant-garde artists present self-destructive works that deny the aesthetic criteria of their times. Park's poems always change. Within, outside, and in between poems, his poetry keeps changing its face. His works resist definition in any form.
Park's poetic world aims at creating a perfect art form and seeks organic wholeness found in word combinations. He plays with the language in both sound and meaning in an artistic way. Once these words go into the world of language and join the play of words, the obtrusiveness in his poetry disappears. Then, only such moments that provide self-satisfactory and aesthetic pleasures remain. It means to play with poems, solve them, read them aloud, and enjoy them. Then the content becomes unimportant, and the readers are allowed to be immersed in the poetry itself and have a pleasurable or heartbreaking conversation with poetic narrators.
200 Grams of Sad Potatoes (슬픈감자 200그램, 2017), composed in three parts, the poet uses experimental language to depict the shapeless and unmeasurable quality of human sorrow. In his latest collection, The Night, the night, the night (밤이, 밤이, 밤이, 2018), the poet uses original typography and portrait-like structure, his characteristic word endings and selection of unusual vocabulary with an emphasis on visual, rhythmic elements.
