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[ENGLISH] The Openness of Being scrap
by Zach Savich
March 5, 2026
The poetry of Oh Eun, winner of the Daesan Literary Award, is often celebrated for its imaginative wordplay and shifts in logic. From Being to Being, his first collection to appear in English, translated by Shyun Ahn, shows how playfulness can reveal new forms of understanding.
“Whenever I’m writing poetry, I feel as though I’m always just about to arrive somewhere,” Oh said in a recent interview (KLN 68, 2025). The mood of continual arrival is clear from the beginning of “The Feeling of a Season,” the first poem in the collection: “I liked a corner / When I leaned on it / I became a waiting person.” Oh has said that the “effort at ‘becoming’ is one of the most important elements” of his poetry. In these lines, the speaker arrives into a new sense of himself as a person; in a flash, he has fully become one who is waiting.
In Oh’s poetry, the swiftness of trans-formation—from being to being, from moment to moment—is matched by his preservation of not knowing. His poems are at once precise and porous, specific and open-ended. “I felt something disappear,” he writes later in the book’s first poem. The abstraction of “something” appears frequently in the collection (“I felt something in my hand,” “something couldn’t be grasped”). Its ambiguity shows Oh’s interest in the more general “feeling” of a season, or a life, not just its particulars. “In the end,” he writes, “the feeling is important. Feeling rich rather than being rich. Feeling alive rather than being alive.”
From these feelings, the details that emerge can be startling and vivid (“when you open a mailbox, an eye”). Other times, Oh’s poetry resists particularity. This avoidance reflects his ambivalence about a world in which “literally nothing / works out magically / so a mind grows heavy.” Oh evades this heaviness by focusing on the possibility of further wonder. “In a moment my life will start anew,” he writes. His poems are invested in the “blanks” in which a beautiful “exception” may still arrive.
Oh’s poetry is sometimes described as childlike, and the poems in From Being to Being often evoke childhood directly. They have the freshness of one who sees the moon as a “round thing,” of a child exploring the connections between their feelings and the world. But they also possess an adult understanding of the limits of feeling and the imagination. “No matter how angsty I was,” Oh writes, “something could never catch fire.”
The volume is part of the Moon Country Korean Poetry Series from Black Ocean Press. The series includes English translations of contemporary Korean poetry by Moon Boyoung, Ha Jaeyoun, Pak Jeong-de, and many others. The book includes an insightful essay on Oh’s poetry by Kwon Hyeok-woong. Kwon suggests that for Oh, “play itself is a revolution,” and the essay itself is fittingly playful. It will also help a reader of English understand Oh’s intricate use of homonyms and homophones. In Ahn’s admirably lucid translation, those effects are sometimes invoked directly, as when “sole” clearly suggests “soul.” Often, they extend from Ahn’s inventive attention to idioms and repetition: “All the jarring things had become jars,” reads one line. “It wanted to hole up in the hole,” reads another.
These repetitions also highlight Oh’s re-lation to the personal and personhood. “There are There are There are people,” he writes. In “The Feeling of a Season,” the poem’s speaker becomes a “waiting person”; across the collection, “person” often serves as both category and character. In the following lines, for example, the three statements can be read as describing one person, a series of people, or more general concepts: “a person who opens their eyes / a person who opens their ears / a person who starts reading.” In a review of Oh’s latest collection, Kim Un notes the “unstable mutability” of pronouns and other personal referents (KLN 68, 2025). That interest is clear in this volume, first published in 2016. “You are a third-person pronoun,” Oh writes, a delectable paradox that centers on the second-person pronoun “you.”
Throughout From Being to Being, Oh shows his faith in whimsy and wonder, alongside his understanding that “all childhood dreams are silly dreams.” And yet, those dreams are purposeful and not easy to come by (“even a silly dream is hard to find when it’s needed”). His poetry focuses on the work it takes to keep possibilities open so that further magic might appear.
Writer 필자 소개
Zach Savich
Zach Savich is a prizewinning poet whose latest books are Momently (2024) and A Field of Telephones (2025). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.
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