“May I crash into you and crack my head?

Before the question ended, I started to fly

And I cracked my head”

A rebirth that begins from destruction

Love that starts from entanglement

The world that emerges from small humans, small universe, and small me

Park Yeonjun, a poet, essayist, and novelist beloved by readers across genres since her debut with the Joongang Literature Prize for New Writers in 2004, is back with her fifth poetry collection, Go See If Love is Dead. This special new collection of poems celebrates her 20th debut anniversary and is published five years after the small poetry collection Night, Rain, and Snake (Hyundae Munhak, 2019). Twenty years ago in A Scream that Eyelashes Make (Changbi, 2007), Park’s narrator denied life and the world and described the pain of ripping bare flesh without reserve; she has grown to be able to “mediate the discord between me and myself” (Shin Hyung-cheol, from a review on Father Called Me Sister-In-Law, Munhakdongne, 2012) in the poetic world of burning sadness and grief over the loss of loved ones. Since then, Park has been demonstrating mesmerizing rhythms in her verses and has been praised for her “cheerful and lively aesthetics of eroticism that emanates from her intimate and delicate use of language.” (Cho Jae-ryong, from a commentary on Venus Pudica, Changbi, 2017) Now, she has come to share her quiet night with her readers, saying, “My poems, they are music that I write and you play.” (from an essay in Night, Rain, and Snake)

In this collection, readers will meet the narrator who focuses more on “the small.” The 58 poems listed seem to testify that it is a poem’s job to scrutinize the microcosmic world—small humans, small universe, and small me—and a poet’s job to reveal that the small is not trivial but close to the essence. “To say small is to be a small human (...) Open a notebook and there is / a square for small humans / Flat, neither dead nor alive / names / An insignificant list of names walks around / With small name tags, small, small” (from Small Humans)... The smaller we get, the less important distinction becomes, and we can then “draw the smallest circle in the world” (from Salvation). We will learn to feel hurt for “Buying and selling little deaths / Loving little deaths / Little deaths feeding and keeping us alive” (from When Little Pigs Are on a Cart”)—and that no big thing is possible without a lot of finely-gathered little things.

The resolution “From now on // I will serve only the small things” (from June Garden) creates a strange yet beautiful cacophony with the “things I shattered / things that are broken” scattered throughout the collection. If Park’s devotion to “small humans” is the current state of her poetic world, the idea of actively shattering or being broken by something is the core of that world which she has been actively exploring and creating.

The title of the collection, Go See if Love is Dead, is fraught with meaning; it can be read as worrying that love is dead or confirming that it is not yet dead, while it can also be interpreted as fearing to confirm the death as well as in excitement waiting for it at the same time. It is also significant as it is a conversation between a phoenix, which does not stop even when it knows its head will crack and it will die at the speed it flies, and a cobblestone, which has not been broken “yet” and produces reserved respond that love is not “yet” dead. In a short interview with the editor before the publication, Park said of the line which became the collection’s title that it “contains the many feelings we can have when we toss and turn in love” and that she “wanted this request to be the face of the book.” From the love of a cool night of desire to the love that boils uncontrollably to the love that resembles the bold and reckless phoenix, the gradations of love that we have come to expect from Park’s poetry grace the readers with this collection. Of course, her readers will also know that savoring such love will naturally come with pain.

The changes in a poet’s poetic world cannot be separated from her biological age and experiences in between. In particular, in Park’s case, “between [her] thirty and forty, / there was prose.” (from the same poem) The time she spent writing in different bodies and voices through prose collections and novels must have affected her poetry. Could we also say that growing old has become as concrete as death compared to previous collections? “To grow old / is to wear the rumpled clothes of time;” it is about how “The smell of bread wafts from the street corner / but the time to buy the bread is gone.” If only we could bake “his back, his face, his smile / like baking bread” (A Sewing Machine and an Oven)—but we can't, so we would spend more time sewing than baking, pausing our hands at the sewing machine when the poet asks, “Which of the three is stronger, love, aging, or sorrow?”—all the while “without sewing anything.” (from the same poem)

If a phoenix is flying at the beginning of the collection, a dead bird is lying at its end. “With its beak buried inward / A dead bird, its slender legs outstretched.” “It doesn’t matter much how you got here,” the poet writes, “you have lived it all.” (Dead Bird) It would have already happened to the phoenix several times before, just as “a baby born yesterday also went through the night” and “has the dark hair, crafted strand by strand by the night.” (A Baby Born Yesterday Also Went Through the Night) In this repeated cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, or the mystery thereof, a small universe unfolds in front of us—the world in which Park Yeonjun, now pursuing to become a small human who speaks small, will continue to create in detail.

This work is introduced in KLN Summer 2024. View sample translation now: Korean Literature Now - KLN > Lines > Poetry > Two Poems by Park Yeon Joon