Cover Features

[Essay] Becoming a Poet

  The literary establishment in Korea operates on a unique “literary debut” (deungdan) system, which serves as a rite of passage for aspiring writers. This often places the author in a passive position, in need of critical appraisal from official institutions to begin a literary career, with further publications dependent on commissions. The debut system has staunchly persisted even amid concerns over this reduction in authorial autonomy in the name of discovering new talented writers, as well as questions about the power wielded by critical institutions. In recent years, a new and significant current has formed around authors who have sought different paths to publication. Declaring themselves authors on their own authority, these writers have taken an active, assertive stance in finding their own entryway to the literary scene. These are their stories.  by An Boyun   Long ago, when I was only an essence, like mist floating through the air, I slowly took form in my mother’s womb, until one winter I was born in the shape of a tiny person. Being born is similar to becoming a poet in at least one way—you can’t choose your own birthday. Sometimes you meet poets who became poets by chance, much as birth itself is a matter of chance. I’ve heard many stories from poets who never had any big hopes or profound intentions of becoming one. Maybe a friend secretly submits your writings to a contest, and you win a prize. Suddenly, you’re a writer. There are plenty of stories like this. If you ask these poets how they ended up as poets, they invariably respond, “Who knows?” I barely knew how to become a poet, but I knew I’d do anything to make it happen. To explain how I came to that decision, we’ll have to go back to my childhood. In elementary school, I was actually more interested in drawing than writing. I drew in my notebooks until the pages were tattered, with my classmates watching over my shoulder. My notebooks filled up with their faces as they clamored around me, asking me to draw them too. Back then, we had a separate computer class. The desktop computer sat like an immovable slab of rock alongside a monitor with rounded corners. During class, we learned to turn the computer on and off, save a file, and create a new Hancom Office document. I made my first email account in that class, too. I tried to draw in MS Paint, but the mouse didn’t move the way I wanted. Pen and paper were still more comfortable. So I opened up Notepad instead and started jotting down something that was not quite a story, and not quite a diary entry, either. It contained too much fiction to be a diary, too much of my real life to be fiction. The .txt file slowly filled with stories about me. In the late 2000s, when I was in middle school, the academic pressure in my neighborhood was so intense that I got swept up in it as well. One day, while I was studying for the entrance exam to a prestigious foreign language high school, one of my classmates asked me if I’d heard about the creative writing program at a certain arts high school and suggested we take the exam together. Swept away once again, I found myself sitting for the exam. (Back then, as now, I was a person easily swept away.) On the day of the exam, my friend failed to show up. I took the test alone and was lucky enough to pass. It was during the high school creative writing program that I saw a real living poet for the first time and started learning to write poetry. Before that, I’d only read poems in textbooks, and all of those poets were long since dead and gone. I also competed in countless impromptu poetry contests, known as “baegiljang,” because awards in such contests would make it easier to get into university. Unfortunately, throughout my three years in high school, I rarely won anything. Poetry was too hard. The collections I read were thinner than my little finger, and when you flipped through the pages, there was so much empty space that it seemed like a waste of paper. The margins were wider than the text. I filled the blank space with notes as I read. One hundred books of poetry were sitting on my bookshelf by the time I decided I wanted to be a poet. It was my second year of high school. I was eighteen years old. I changed the password of my first laptop, which I got when I started high school, from my birth date to “deungdan+@.” Every day, I opened my laptop and thought about how to secure my debut. My desire to become a poet slowly crystallized like clear, solid ice. By the late 2010s, I had graduated from the creative writing program of an arts university and was working part-time while attending privately run poetry workshops. There were two ways to learn poetry from an active poet in Korea—creative writing lectures held at a university, or courses run privately by publishing houses or bookstores. These private lessons were usually relatively small, lasting from four to eight weeks with around ten to twenty students, and functioned like a typical workshop in which students bring in poems they’ve written to read and discuss. The university classes were so large that most students could only workshop three to five poems per semester, so many students signed up for private courses as well. Whether in the university classroom or in the private workshops, the aspiring poets were every bit as intense as anyone studying for a high-stakes test, but we all tried not to let it show. That sort of intensity didn’t seem to suit a poet, I suppose. With my feigned expression of nonchalance, I kept on dreaming about the moment I would become a poet. As of October 2025, there are a few basic ways to start a career as a poet in Korea. They are as follows: Spring Literary Contests (Sinchun Munye)Held annually by major newspapers including The Chosun Ilbo, The Dong-A Ilbo, Hankook Ilbo, Kyunghyang Shinmun, Seoul Shinmun, and Segye Ilbo. Contest entries are accepted each October, and the winners are published on January 1 of the following year. In the poetry section, poets submit three to five poems each, with every newspaper receiving thou­sands of entries. (A total of 5,404 poems were entered into The Dong-A Ilbo Spring Literary Contest in 2025.) Emerging Writer Awards (Sininsang) by Literary MagazinesAwards bestowed by established literary journals upon new and emerging writers. Submission periods and length requirements differ by journal, and win­ners of the poetry section typically publish their first collection in the selected poetry series of the publishing house affiliated with the journal. The major magazines include Literature and Society, The Quarterly Changbi, Munhakdongne The Quarterly, and Hyundae Munhak. The Daesan Literary Awards for College StudentsPresented by the Daesan Foundation and only open to university students. In the past, the reception of this award was not recognized as constituting an official debut, but this has begun to change recently with the successful careers of winners like Kim Yeon-deok. Independent Literary MagazinesLiterary journals that are not affiliated with a major organization or publisher and are published independently by an individual or small group. The independent literary magazine Begae, for instance, accepts submissions regardless of debut status and publishes poetry collections in its own selected poetry series. Publication of a Poetry CollectionPublishers such as Achimdal, Samin, Paran, and Geodneun Saram accept submissions and publish collections of poetry regardless of debut status. There is no limit on the number of poets selected, and curators or editors personally arrange and select the manuscripts. Kim Suyeong Literary Award (Minumsa Publishing)Open to poets regardless of debut status. Poetry collections by the winners are published in the Minumsa selected poetry series. Mailing ServicesSubscription services in which the author sends writings directly to readers, in the manner of YSRA’s Daily YSRA. This makes it possible to achieve a writing career outside of traditional institutions of print publishing.  Of the options listed above, the spring literary contests and emerging writer awards from established literary magazines constitute the traditional literary debut system. The other alternatives have appeared largely over the past five to six years, broadening and diversifying the available routes to debut. In Korea, to become a poet typically means to debut—that is, to “deungdan.” The literal meaning of the word “deungdan” is “to go up onto a pile of dirt.”* In other words, to go up onto the “mundan” (literary stage or scene), for all to see. This has traditionally meant being selected as the winner of a spring literary contest held by a major newspaper or an emerging writer award granted by an established literary magazine. The single person who breaks through the thousand-to-one odds receives the title of poet. * Translator’s note: This phrasing is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The “pile of dirt” referred to here is better described as a ceremonial earthen mound or altar, and the word is more commonly understood today as “stage” or “scene,” as in “the literary scene.” To be selected in this way is to be called up as a poet. At that moment, a poet is born. The day a poet debuts is their poetic birthday. Like me before my “birth,” the poems I saved as files on my computer existed only in faint, mercurial form, to be born only once they were granted a body as print on paper. I anxiously awaited the day my poems would appear in the pages of a newspaper or magazine and eventually take material form as a book that I could actually touch with my own hands. I had already made it past the preliminary round of a spring literary contest when I was in university, so at first it felt as if my debut was within reach. Just as I began to tire of waiting, I heard about a new publisher called Achimdal Books. Word was getting around among aspiring poets that Achimdal would accept submissions regardless of debut status. The debut system was slowly showing signs of change. The shift began around 2016 with the emergence of a selected poetry series by the publisher Samin. The online purchase page for the first collection in the series, Eugene Mok’s The Book of Love, featured the following statement on the publisher’s intentions: “Many poets have long since made the persuasive argument that it’s impossible to judge a poet’s potential from a few short poems.” They were criticizing the spring literary contest’s method of judging based on three to five poems. The statement went on, “Our goal is to fill this series with collections by talented poets, who will be evaluated on submissions of fifty to sixty poems at once, enough to fill a collection.” This example is often cited as an important early effort at diversifying the debut system. Another background to the debut system’s diversification was the 2016 Sexual Violence in the Literary Scene movement, which predated and overlapped with the #MeToo movement in Korea. It was then that incidents of sexual abuse by teachers in arts high schools or private workshops against their young students entered the public discourse over social media. There were many victims and perpetrators. The argument that the problem was not merely individual but systemic gained traction, and for aspiring female poets like myself, it was painful to see that literature, which should be something beautiful and free, was wrapped up in violence. The root of the problem lay in the debut system. The limited options for starting a literary career reinforced the hierarchy between poet (teacher) and poet aspirant (student). Young, aspiring poets desperate to debut were easily exposed to gaslighting by their poet-teachers. The call grew louder for changes to the debut process and for a healthier literary ecosystem. The literary scene was like a forest populated by various plants. If diversity were respected, the chains holding back aspiring poets would loosen naturally. In 2018, Achimdal Books posted their Featured Poets series as a project on tumblbug. The crowdfunding platform was the best method available to a young publishing company without the capital of major publishers. Achimdal said their goal was to discover new poets regardless of their debut status, and they tried to avoid the hierarchical implications of referring to editors as “judges,” opting instead for the term “curator” to express the horizontal relationship between reviewers and submitters. While the earlier effort by Samin had emphasized a strict standard for publishing a poetry collection, Achimdal was placing more focus on diversifying paths to debut. I submitted a set of around thirty poems to Achimdal, and they soon sent me a publication offer. However, I made the decision to hold off on publishing and keep trying for the spring literary contests and emerging writer awards. I was still afraid of trying something new. The curator, poet Kim Un, kindly respected my hesitation. Turning away from the open door to publication, I fell back into my position as an aspiring poet. In the fall of 2018, Achimdal released the first nine collections of its Featured Poets series at once, and gingko nuts squished under my shoes as I walked down the street. The pungent smell filled the air, but it still didn’t really feel like fall to me yet. Another curator at Achimdal, poet Kim So Yeon, said something that stuck with me. “What if you just declare yourself a poet right now, from this day forward?” Those might not have been her exact words, but that was her point. The idea that I could just call myself a poet gave me courage. It was also the reason curator Kim So Yeon had joined Achimdal’s project in the first place. Of course, the publication of my first collection was only possible with the help of the publishing house, the curators, and so many others, so I couldn’t really say I’d become a poet all on my own. And it was no different in the sense that I became a part of the system. Nevertheless, publishing my poetry as a collection was a new path. In the existing debut system, I’d have been judged on three to ten poems, then published in magazines and journals for three to four years before putting out my first collection. It would be similar to a singer putting out single albums with a couple of songs each until they have enough to perform a solo concert. Debuting with a full collection, on the other hand, was like putting on a solo concert for my debut. I was worried I’d feel like I was standing alone on stage in front of a stadium of empty seats. That’s how reckless an endeavor it seemed to me at the time. Though my fears remained, I decided to go forward with the publication. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I still had a lingering attachment to the debut I’d dreamed of for so long. What I feared most of all was that I might still not be a poet even after I’d published my first book in this way. But amid the courageous efforts of so many writers, poets, and publishers in the literary community to dream up a new approach for a healthier literary ecosystem, I could finally feel that winter had arrived. On January 31, 2019, I released my first poetry collection and put myself out into the world as a poet. When I did my first reading for the collection, someone asked me, “When do you most feel that you’ve become a poet?”“Whenever other people call me a poet, it feels like I’m becoming one bit by bit,” I said. I could really feel that I’d made it because of all the readers and fellow writers who read my collection and shared their thoughts with me. I am always grateful to them. It’s thanks to them that I’m now working on my third collection—to become a poet again, just as winter comes around once more. I do my best never to forget the gift of being read, and to read the poetry of my fellow poets as much as I can. I hold my breath and focus on the voice of another poet. It’s like tilting your head to hear the birds chirping in the forest. This is how we help each other be born as poets.

by Jo Hae Ju

Cover Features

[Essay] The Birth of a Life-Challenged Author

  The literary establishment in Korea operates on a unique “literary debut” (deungdan) system, which serves as a rite of passage for aspiring writers. This often places the author in a passive position, in need of critical appraisal from official institutions to begin a literary career, with further publications dependent on commissions. The debut system has staunchly persisted even amid concerns over this reduction in authorial autonomy in the name of discovering new talented writers, as well as questions about the power wielded by critical institutions. In recent years, a new and significant current has formed around authors who have sought different paths to publication. Declaring themselves authors on their own authority, these writers have taken an active, assertive stance in finding their own entryway to the literary scene. These are their stories.  by An Boyun   George Orwell said there are four motives for writing: political purpose, sheer egoism, historical impulse, and aesthetic enthusiasm. I had four motives as well: no friends, no money, no energy, and no dreams for the future. The only thing I knew for sure as a young university student was that I didn’t have these four things. I spent my days going from class to my part-time job, and back. On the first day of summer break, I lay in bed looking up at the dorm-room ceiling and muttered to myself, “One thing. I need just one single thing I can call my own.”  I turned on my netbook and stared at a blank Hancom Office document. More nothing. I was so tired of having nothing. I decided to fill up the page. Maybe I could at least do that. It was just letters, after all. The page was its own world—if I pressed a key, a letter appeared on the screen. Was there a more honest world than this? To fill up the page, I tried to imagine the most talkative speaker in the world. Who would have that much to say? Someone who’d never spoken before, someone whose voice would go unheard even if spoken. Then I thought of the pigeons that gathered in the courtyard in front of the dorms. My first narrator would be a pigeon. A pigeon was bound to have plenty to gripe about. After all, the world acts so petty toward pigeons. One minute they’re pest birds that represent poor, dirty city life, and the next they’re held up as a symbol of peace and the Holy Spirit. Everyone, including me, skirts around them in the street like they’re filthy, then steps into the grocery store to buy cleaning products like Pigeon fabric softener or Dove soap. Suddenly this behavior felt so rude, but also funny. Caught in this contradiction between hatred and holiness, what would a pigeon say if it had a voice? I decided to hand the mic to a pigeon working in the circus as a magician’s assistant. The pigeon preened its feathers and checked the lights in preparation for the performance of a lifetime, recounting the generational story of its family through the world wars, industrialization, and the Olympics, spanning a century of modern history. When I finished the story, I was in a daze. Sitting quietly in my practically empty room, I had created something. It didn’t look like I was doing anything at all, but I had become an author. In what must’ve been a stroke of beginner’s luck, my first short story made it to the final round of a spring literary contest. Then it was rejected. After that, I had to drink from the bitter cup of defeat several more times with several more stories. Of course, it was encouraging to occasionally make it to the final round. I read and reread the judges’ comments so many times I lost count. I could leave it at that and look cool, but I have to admit that sometimes, I let those comments hold me back. The flaws they pointed out made me self-conscious about my limitations as a writer. “Am I rushing this character offstage again?”“Is this story going anywhere? Every story needs a strong beginning and ending.”  Slowly, the standards of “good writing” were starting to form in my mind. When I got frustrated, I watched stand-up comedy. I felt liberated whenever I saw a set that went all out on heavy topics like religion, death, and sexuality. I was captivated by how well the genre juggled right and wrong, success and failure, beauty and ugliness. Soon I was memorizing the silly, vulgar jokes. When I saw an exceptional stand-up comedian, they reminded me of a character in a classic work of literature. It felt like watching Holden Caulfield step out of Catcher in the Rye, snatch the mic, and start chattering away. I enjoyed being swept away in the cascade of grievances and self-contempt. Moreover, many of the comedians I liked also had roots in literature. Norm Macdonald read widely from Russian literature, Anthony Jeselnik wanted to be a novelist, and Ari Shaffir majored in English literature. When I found out the highest honor in English-language comedy was the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, I was happy because it felt like an acknowledgment that literature was the source of comedy’s spirit of satire and wit. Reaching the rather audacious conclusion that there wasn’t much separating the stand-up comedy scene from the literary scene, I decided to try stand-up. As it turned out, I had as much to say as a pigeon. I had so much to say—as a vegetarian, as a daughter, as an “ugly” woman, and simply as a human being in Korean society. Plus, to start out as a stand-up comedian, there are no job interviews or any other institutional hoops. Anyone can sign up to experiment in the joke laboratory of the open mic. All I had to do was get on stage, watch my jokes fail miserably, and slowly gather up the few that were passable. At night I tested out my jokes, and during the day I wrote stories. For a long time, I spent every day holed up alone in my room, but fortunately that life suited my personality well. After a few years I’d gathered some jokes and completed a novel.  Around 10 p.m. on January 31, 2024, Park Hye-jin, a well-known critic and editor at the publisher Minumsa, followed me on Instagram. I’d been waiting for a response from Minumsa ever since I submitted my novel to them for consideration. I stayed up all night trying not to read too much into that follow. Getting my hopes up was an all-too-familiar hell. “It’s probably just a follow. Sometimes people do that. I do it too, following and liking things for no reason. You don’t mean anything by it.”“No. There’s no way she just followed you for no reason. That would be . . . too much,” my partner of ten years whined. I snorted out a laugh. Normally my partner would be the one trying to calm me down. The next day, the first of February, I received an email a little after lunchtime. It was from Park Hye-jin. She said she was excited to work with me on my novel!I read the acceptance email again, then caught my breath, read it one more time, and left for a stand-up gig. That night, the other comedians in the waiting room all looked lovely. Even the cough drops and scattered pens on the dressing-room table made my heart ache. To top things off, my set was a success. My LPM (laughs per minute) rate was one of my best. For the first time in my life, someone left me a 50,000-won tip, along with a sticky note that read, “Soyoon Won, thank you! See you again next time.” As I stood there smitten with my note, K oppa looked at me and said, “They must know a thing or two about comedy.”I’d like to take this space to thank that audience member. When the show finished, I went out for drinks with the other comedians. The soju went down smooth, and the kimchi jeon was nice and crispy. I thought I might get carried away if things kept up like this. I turned to P oppa and made him promise to get me home. “I’m having a really good day. I can’t tell you why yet, but something amazing happened. But I don’t wanna get too drunk and have this end up my ‘lucky day,’ * so make sure I don’t die before the night’s over.” * Translator’s note: A reference to colonial-era author Hyeon Jin-geon’s short story “A Lucky Day,” in which the protagonist finally has a good day at work, so that he can afford to buy his ailing wife a bowl of nourishing soup, only to find her already dead when he gets home. The protagonist also stops by the bar and gets drunk on his way back. He must’ve been pretty confused. If it was such a good day, I should’ve been offering to buy them all drinks, but here I was demanding he catch me a taxi. Safely on my way home, I pulled out my phone and read the Minumsa editor’s email a few more times. Then I reviewed my recording of my set from earlier. My phone is full of recordings of my performances. Of course, the recordings are a mishmash of laughter and silence, people coughing, and shot glasses shattering on the floor. The same kind of things that fill my fiction.  The theme for this KLN essay was “the birth of an author.” While I was writing it, comedian Jeon Yu-seong passed away. He was the comedian who coined the term “gagman,” the word for comedian in Korean, along with his own comedy troupe, the first university “gag department,” and the long-running TV comedy show Gag Concert. I never met or even so much as exchanged a few words with him. To be honest, I never felt much camaraderie with him, either. I considered him an institutional elder comedian. But my fellow stand-up comic K oppa spent several years in his troupe. It was K oppa who informed me of his death.  “I think your book was the last one he read in the hospital,” he told me. “When he got done reading, he looked up and said, ‘This kid’s got a way with words.’”P oppa added, “Your book’s such a snoozefest, I bet it put him to sleep. He thought he’d just take a little nap. Then BAM! Dead of boredom.” After that, I had to attend the funeral.On the way there in K oppa’s car, nothing but sad songs were playing on the radio. I didn’t want to cry in front of a bunch of comedians—in other words, I didn’t want to get made fun of—so I quickly searched songs by PSY, but somehow every single one was sad.“What’s up with these songs? This is supposed to be PSY,” I said.The other comedians in the car nodded and said PSY had a lot of sad songs. When I finally found something with a beat, the mood in the car actually sank, and everyone looked sadder. I wondered what sort of jokes Jeon Yu-seong told during his life, so I searched.“We call someone who can’t keep a beat ‘rhythmically challenged.’ Someone who’s tone-deaf is ‘tonally challenged.’ Someone who’s always getting lost is ‘directionally challenged.’ I can’t figure out how to live. I don’t even know how I ended up here. I guess I’m ‘life challenged!’”* * Jeon Yu-seong, Like It’s My First Day on Earth (Huckleberry Books, 2023). It didn’t even sound like a joke. It just made me wonder what end awaited the life-challenged. When I stood before Jeon Yu-seong’s portrait at the funeral hall, I looked down and noticed his baseball cap resting among the bed of chrysanthemums. Printed unmistakably on the cap was the word “comedy.” Seeing that cap made the distance I felt between us seem totally immaterial. As I went to eat, I could hear the boisterous clamor coming from the dining room. I’d never seen such a noisy funeral hall. I let out a laugh. I’d also never seen funeral guests with such wild hairstyles. I laughed all through the meal. At the other tables, I recognized so many familiar faces from the entertainment world. There was no way to know who’d gone through the proper process and who was an unconventional hire. Yet here they were, all gathered in one place. And so many magicians, too. Apparently Jeon Yu-seong loved magic. “Let’s get the magicians to bring him back to life right now. Then we can have them send him back again after an hour or so,” P oppa said. “P hyung, that joke’s already been made about a hundred times since yesterday,” K oppa told him. P oppa smiled sheepishly. I turned to K oppa. “I wish I could’ve met him to say thank you for reading my book,” I said, knowing it was silly. “Or maybe not. Was that not his style?” “I’m sure he would’ve liked that,” K oppa said. Caught off guard by his certainty, I said, “Oh, come on. I’m nobody.” K oppa doubled down, “He’d have absolutely loved it.” To be honest, whether in comedy or literature, I’ve always felt a certain sense of pride in not having properly debuted or joined a prestigious troupe. I suppose I relished the idea of myself as some sort of maverick of K-literature and K-comedy. But now that pride feels silly. I can recognize the long and storied tradition that came before me. In the end, we all just have something we want to say. And we’re mesmerized by whatever form expresses it best. Caught up in that fascination, we go on saying what we have to say, even without the proper qualifications or conviction, writing life-challenged jokes and life-challenged fiction.

by Soyoon Won

Interviews

[Interview] The Work of Collecting, Dislocating, and Transplanting

When I think of you, the first thing that comes to mind is your collection Biologicity. I just intuitively got so many sensations from it about poetic lan­guage. I think every poet in Korea must have read it. If your first collection, Precise Arrangement, scratched the surface of your poetics, Biologicity, your second, feels like the book itself is a body for its poems, alive and moving. The way I’d put it is that it was as if the coat you’d previously worn artificially turned into skin. How did you use your time to give your collection that sense of having a body? Around the time Precise Arrangement came out in 2005, I wrote a children’s book. It was pretty long—dozens of pages. That was a moment when I started having doubts: Are poems the thing I really want to write? I liked writing things I’d imagined much more than I liked writing about the world of experience. But in my poems, I hated going on and on describing or explaining the scenes I was imagining. How are you going to preserve the scenes you imagine without describing or explaining them, though? In Precise Arrangement, I’d assigned places to the poem’s voices by the titles and subtitles of the chapters—“Motel Cello, Room 102,” “Black and White Village,” and so forth. As a way of extrapolating. Wrapping things from the outside. But is this all there is? Should I be writing something other than poems? What if what I want to write isn’t right for a poem? That’s what was going through my mind when I wrote the children’s story. Back then, I was thinking that maybe the genre of children’s fiction might fit my imagi­nation, because it’d paraphrase these weird scenes and images I’d either written, or wanted to write, into poems. I don’t think what I wrote would have resonated with actual kids. And after I wrote that, I realized: the stuff I’d planned to write as poems, I had to write as poems. And what I didn’t want to write, I didn’t have to write. So to do that, I felt around for a way to drop the anchor of sensa­tion in those scenes from my imagination, and wrote the poems that went into Biologicity. I’d like to ask when you first knew you had to write poetry. You made your formal literary debut when you were twenty-four, and after that, you kept on steadily publishing collections about once every five years, on average. And when I think about how those books evolved not so much from honing your earlier language, but rather continually betraying and overthrowing it—I’m just astonished by your ferocity, your perseverance. I’ve always loved reading and writing since I was very young. But I didn’t think I’d end up writing poetry. Because like plenty of other people, I thought poetry was something only exceptionally talented people wrote. But when I was in college, a professor compli­mented me on this poem I’d turned in as a class project. You know how sometimes compliments are really powerful? So I submitted to a Sinchun Munye contest on a lark, and gosh, I got picked. So it was actually after I’d won this formal debut contest that I basically started learning the craft. It was only then that I started shedding all these hazy illusions about poetry, and I had to reconsider what I wanted to write, and whether that was poetry or not, a bunch of times. And if I did move in the direction of betraying and overthrowing the way I’d worked before, maybe it was because the self-doubt leached into my body. There are a lot of instances in your poetry of highly unusual words. I think this has only gotten more pronounced in your recent books. The way you manage to bring this totally unpoetic vocabulary into your poems—it leaves me amazed. The thought’s occurred to me that Korean poetry’s denotative range has really expanded because of your work. Could you reflect a bit on your way of using words? Whether at the level of words or the sentence, I think anyone who writes poems is going to have their own particular fetish about language. I’m that way, too. And everyone’s way of handling that fetish goes into making a poem’s style, I suppose. In my case, I might say I work at “collecting,” “dislocating,” and “transplanting.” For starters, I collect words no matter what. Especially words with a strange energy to them—but which, in their original context and range, look subordinate to their indexical function, dead and buried under the dust of habit. I think, Can I bring the word back to life? And when I think that, I’m taking it out of its original place, moving it to different earth, and planting it. I can’t just inject it with whatever meaning I want. If I did that, it’d just turn into a private code. But words that aren’t encrypted are necessarily enfolded within a shared world and history, by their very nature. So I’m digging them up by the roots, moving them, and planting them somewhere else where they can have a new life—and in order to do that, my role is to choose the soil of a text, and fertilize them there. In your second collection, Biologicity, there’s a poem, “White,” that starts: “It’s cold. / I don’t want to be catalogued.” The critic Shin Hyoung Cheol reads these lines this way: “When we lose our independence, absorbed into generality—that is, when I’m no longer my unique, intact self—we get ‘catalogued.’” And he says that once the poet’s aspirations get catalogued, they tend to go awry. But then, the moment I picked up your fourth collection, Caecilians, I ran right into—a catalogue! That made such an impression on me. There are two possible questions here. I’d like to ask: What is a “catalogue” to you? And how did your poetry change between Biologicity and Caecilians? “Catalogue.” I didn’t think about it all that hard, but you’re right. That’s true of the first poem in Caecilians, and it’s also true of the back cover—I just made a catalogue of four-character words.  To come at it another way: let’s take the word “sigangam” [“time-feel”]. The emotional fruition of time. Once I jotted down a note that said something like this: “Alchemists set out to make gold; artists try to produce time.” Even if you’re just dealing with a fraction of a mo­ment. I think literature is the challenge of trying to save time in textual form. Sort of the opposite of the idiom “killing time.” (That phrase is so fraught with resentment toward time.)  In Biologicity, I wanted to try to save time in that void created between lines, between stanzas. But I couldn’t put in movement just by leaving the space empty. Not time’s flow—time’s motion. It needed something like aether. And I might have switched directions by giving that role to the rhythm of the catalogue.  You must have gotten a ton of questions about the titles of your books. I’m curious, too, especially about Biologicity, which was your second book, then syzygy, which followed it, and Caecilians. They somehow talk about the collection, but without explaining it. Every time you’ve published a book, I feel like I’m hearing you say, “This is the lump I’m gonna show you this time.” You don’t just unwrap it and see what’s inside—it’s just a lump of matter, and there’s no distinction between the two. How do you go about choosing your titles? The titles of the poems kept changing as they came together into a collection. I’d make “Biologicity” the title of one poem, then another poem, and it just kept floating around because it couldn’t find a place. You know that feeling of sliding around because you can’t stick anywhere? So, ironically, “Biologicity” left its traces over a bunch of different poems. And then I thought, why not make it the title of the whole book?In the case of syzygy and Caecilians, I settled on titles when I’d written about half the poems. And the moment I came across the words “syzygy” and “caeci­lian,” I knew. I knew the poems I was writing then were all aiming at the materiality of those words. You’ve written two books of literary criticism (not under your pen name, Hae-uk, but your given name), three books of essays, and a novel, The Dream Reader Electrical Shop. It must feel like you’re in a totally different body from when you’re writing poetry. I bring this up because I think if we hear you comparing how you wrote them, we might be able to get a different angle on your process. Well, the two books I wrote under my legal name weren’t really criticism so much as research. One was the edited version of my thesis, which traced the development of writing in Korean. The history of writing in hangeul with Korean word order is surprisingly short. Most writing was in Literary Sinitic up to the end of the nineteenth century. I wanted to look into the deep origins of my own writing.  Out of my two more recent non-poetry books, The Dream Reader Electrical Shop got published as a novel, and Looking out the Window came out a year later as a collection of essays. But when I was writing them, I thought of both as somewhere on the border between novel and essay. It wasn’t so much that I was hunting for something in particular on that border. There’s something in calling them novels that didn’t feel right, and something in calling them essays that didn’t feel right, either—like I felt some magnetic repulsion to genres. At any rate, as I was working on these two non-poetry books, I realized something more clearly about how I write poetry.  Scenes, thoughts, feelings—when the thing I want to express is at the forefront, I approach it in prose.  But vocabulary, passages, sentences—when those matter more, I’m writing in verse. So for instance, my plan at first for The Dream Reader Electrical Shop was to write a collection of my dreams that would be close to poetry, and I had this hope that they’d all read like poems. But I didn’t think of my dreams as poems.Because I wanted to stay loyal in bringing dreamscapes into the language of this world. It was a kind of transla­tion. Writing dreams for what they are was something quite different from writing poems that borrowed motifs or images from dreams.  And when I write in prose, I have to write sentences I don’t especially want to write, too. You have to keep the context and the situation consistent. When I write poetry, I only write what I want. But even though it might sound like tons of fun to write just what you want, it’s actually even more aggravating, because it all has to make sense in the end, right? Because poems have to be made out of words, too. When you write only what you want to write, and you don’t explain word by word, and you don’t have to adhere to the laws of cause and effect, what kind of word-world might be possible? So when you write a poem, you can’t avoid going on an adventure.  And you might put it in a metaphor this way: You have to cross a street but there’s no crosswalk. How are you going to do it? Even if it’s a pain, prose hunts around for a crosswalk or an underpass, and eventually crosses the street in orderly, everyday steps. Poetry leaps like a dancer and touches down on the other side. When I opened up Caecilians and read your poem “Mysterious Object at Noon,” I came across you saying, “Cross the line. I cross,” and I felt like I was hearing your physical voice. It’s at one and the same time you censoring yourself, but also making a declaration; “crossing lines” is exactly what you do best; and it’s through the act of crossing lines that it becomes possible to draw closer to real objects, real feelings. It’d be great to hear you talk about “Mysterious Object at Noon.” Or the poem right before it, “Demolition.” Could you talk about your work as an experience of “crossing lines” through a particular poem? I once followed a stranger wearing a backpack. They were standing in front of a subway station escalator. The zipper was open the right amount. Not totally all the way open. But you couldn’t say it was completely shut, either. Just the right amount of open. I wanted to slip my hand into it. But I couldn’t. I didn’t tell them their backpack was open, either. After I followed them for a block or so, I wrote two lines on a notebook: “The bag was open. Your bag.” That was the first sentence of “Mysterious Object at Noon.” And then the line you mentioned from the middle of the poem: “Cross the line. I cross.” The distance between those two sentences is really quite far. There had to be something that could withstand, yet also maintain, that sense of distance, and after a long time, I felt like I found that something there on my way back from the National Library in Seocho-dong. That zone where you feel like you’ve transcended the heart of the city even though you’re in the very center of Seoul—the courthouse, the library, the General Services Administration, St. Mary’s Hospital, the department store. When I was in that zone, I felt like I could load that dynamism into those two sentences. In my old way of writing, I would have put it in the blank space between the sentences. But because blanks are pure silence, they can’t convey motion. I don’t know whether that was an experience of “crossing the line,” but I definitely did want to move. You’ve talked about the “foreign-object sensa­tion” as part of language, in an essay you titled “Literature in Korean and the Pleasures of Foreign Objects.” One of the examples you give is how when Bong Joon Ho’s film Madeo (마더) went to Cannes, it got titled Mother. But transliterating the English word “mother” into Korean as “madeo” highlights that discomfort, that feeling like there’s a foreign object somewhere in your body—a sense that the Korean word “eomeoni” would have just blown past. But the audience at Cannes couldn’t feel that when it got turned back into the English word “mother.” In your poem “The Noblewoman and the Grandmother,” the word “olke” appears—this very short, very Korean word for “sister-in-law.” I was sort of excited to see how that might get translated, sort of worried about whether it was even possible! You’ve been writing in this way that draws such incredibly Korean words into your poems, and maximizes that foreign-object sensation, and there are so many other words other than olke that leave you wondering how they’ll be translated. How do you go about thinking about this? I have an olke. But I’ve never called her that. All those words in Korean for extended family by marriage feel awkward on my lips. Pronouncing olke even feels kind of bizarre. But at the same time, I feel a kind of nostalgia about it, too. My late grandmother called my great-aunt, who was younger than her, olke. The awkwardness and the nostalgia coexist in the word. That collision’s the driving force that launched this poem. And I had faith that someone speaking Korean, and who was inside the magnetic field of the poem, would sense the wavelength of that word in their own way from cultural context, irrespective of my own personal context. And how could you translate it? Olke’s the word for a family relationship, and also a term of address; I told my trans­lator that if you can only keep one of the two, better to stress the feeling of people talking to each other than the precise kind of relationship.  There was one other word I asked his opinion about, the word “bo-i” in the poem “humoresque.” It’s a little like what we were saying about Bong Joon Ho’s Mother. I told him that the word “bo-i” in this poem didn’t mean the same thing as English “boy,” that it was a little bit of a dated term from the early- and mid-twentieth century for something like “waiter.” He asked me if I thought the French word “garçon” might work in the English transla­tion. Because it’s not really used in contemporary English anymore, and you only come across it in old movies.  When I think of my poems in translation, they feel like Voyager 2, out beyond our solar system. Because even though I know a decent amount of English, at the level of my own senses, the poems are crossing beyond the horizon of my language. And in the same way I hope the Earth sounds on the Voyager 2 record reach some kind of alien lifeform, I just hope the nuances of my language also touch someone out there.  I was reading “On Location,” which features the historical figure Jang Huibin, and when the line “I couldn’t stand it” appeared, I liked it—but at the same time, it threw me! That’s right. I felt that foreign-object feeling. How even in a place I couldn’t possibly imagine that the lyric “I” would show up, there it showed up anyway. What kind of entity is that lyric “I” to you? Do you have to get at it through the idea that poetry as a genre is impossible without it? Or should we approach it through the foreign-body sensation from that “I” showing up somewhere unexpected? Or if it’s neither of those, give me a sense of where else it might be.  Thank you for noticing that. I also felt a sort of resistance when I put that “I” in “On Location.” The scene would have been clearer, more stable without it. But it had to be there. Can I say it wanted to be involved? Or that it wanted to squeeze in? Or that once it squeezed in, it wanted to be excluded?  I often think I’m stuck in the prison of the first person. I want to get out. But I don’t know how. There are so few times where I put my own experiences and feelings in the center of a poem that it’d be fine for me to leave out that first-person speaker, but I can’t do it. Is that also narcissism? As of right now, all I can say is I have my doubts.   In this new collection, Natural History from the Edge of the Natural, there’s not just a lyric “I,” but also a “One” and a “We.” Their presence seems pretty intentional. “We” leaks into the speaker’s position quite naturally, while it seems kind of hard for “One” to take that spot. “One” is closer to “I” semantically, but grammatically, it’s third-personal. Is “One” here one person out of the many “I’s”? Does the idea of “One” correspond with that of “I”?  Just to add to my earlier answer—you might call “One” an attempt to broaden the range of movement inside the prison of the first person. That’s the hope I try to keep alive in jail. I want to write sentences without subjects. I want to live in a world of headless sentences. It’s an impossible hope. Because even a hidden subject still exists.  But if it has to be there, then what about making it sparse, blurry? Erase traits like gender and age, blur lines between singular and plural, first person and third, individual and group, human and object. If form collapses, and movement and action take center stage, aren’t we at least a little closer to a world of subject-free language? I feel like I can say “One” and “We” ended up appearing as I tried to find the path there. There have already been a wide range of attempts to figure out what the book’s title means, and I’m sure there’s going to be more ahead. But while I have you for this interview, I’d like to hear what you have to say yourself. There are four poems that have the same title as the collection itself. Could you talk a bit about why you decided to emphasize the word “nature” by putting it in your poems, and why you added “edge” and “natural history,” too?  The title just came to me in one piece, so it wasn’t like I was thinking about each individual word. But it is a bit of a weighty title, and I’ve thought in hindsight about how it strikes readers.  “Nature” is a frustrating word. In Korean, it’s “jayeon,” from the roots “ja,” which means “itself” or “on its own,” and “yeon,” “to be that way, be such a way.” “The way things just are” should mean some featureless state that’s just there, but it’s somehow turned into this rigid word for a clear concept positioned at the opposite pole of either civilization or artifice. It’s ossified into the diametric opposite of its original meaning. I feel resistant to it, but it’s such a familiar, everyday word that I couldn’t avoid it. So maybe that’s why I added “edge.” That poses the reverse question: what is “un-natural” in a place that’s neither inside nor outside? And if “edge” asks a spatial question, you might say that “natural history” raises a temporal question.  I’m fond of short stories. Sometimes I gather and read a bunch at once, but sometimes I read them in odd moments. But at some point, I found my tastes finding their way into my poetry. How does it feel to you when you read literature other than poetry, and have you ever found something you enjoy absorbing back into your poems?  I have some sort of challenge when it comes to reading. (I guess it’s ironic for someone who’s chosen to read and write for a living to say she has challenges reading.) Often it’s novels; sometimes I just get stuck at a sentence and I can’t go on to the next one. The problem isn’t that the sentence has some obscure meaning you have to ruminate over to understand. It’s usually when it’s conveying simple, descriptive content. Something like, say, “He was sitting behind the desk.” Well, where is the desk’s front, and what direction is the back pointing? He’s sitting, but how is he sitting? I get hung up on details totally unimportant to actually reading, and start acting out the motions, and then I can’t move on to the next page. It’s like lag time on a computer. But on the other hand, reading poetry, or even just anything that has sentences with a rhythm, tends to just breeze along, regardless of the level of difficulty. Do I dislike that lag time when I’m reading fiction, though? No, not at all. Come to think of it, I kind of enjoy it. It’s yet another plaisir du texte. And almost all these inclinations work their way into writing poems. I’ll never be one of those people who read tons, but I do think I’m at least a “textarian.”  Last of all, I wanted to ask if you have any plans for meeting readers outside of Korea? Please do tell us what’s up next, whether new translations, readings, or other events.  I do know that Natural History from the Edge of the Natural is in the middle of being translated by Spencer Lee-Lenfield, who translated Biologicity. It still has a number of steps to go through before it’s published, so for the moment, I’m just hoping that it all goes smoothly.  KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:Shin Hae-uk, Precise Arrangement (Minumsa, 2005) 신해욱, 『간결한 배치』 (민음사, 2005)Shin Hae-uk, “White,” in Biologicity (tr. Spencer Lee- Lenfield, Black Ocean, 2024) 신해욱, 「화이트」 『생물성』 (문학과지성사, 2009) Shin Hae-uk, syzygy (Moonji, 2014) 신해욱, 『syzygy』 (문학과지성사, 2014) Shin Hae-uk, “Mysterious Object at Noon” and “Demolition,” in Caecilians (Moonji, 2019) 신해욱, 「정오의 신비한 물체」, 「파훼」, 『무족영원』 (문학과지성사, 2019) Shin Hae-uk, “The Noblewoman and the Grandmother,” “Humoresque,” and “On Location,” from Natural History from the Edge of the Natural (Spring Day Books, 2024) 신해욱, 「귀부인과 할머니」, 「유머레스크」, 「로케이션」, 『자연의 가장자리와 자연사』 (봄날의책, 2024) Shin Hae-uk, The Dream Reader Electrical Shop (Changbi, 2020) 신해욱, 『해몽전파사』 (창비, 2020) Shin Hae-uk, Looking out the Window (Moonji, 2021) 신해욱, 『창밖을 본다』 (문학과지성사, 2021) Shin Hae-uk, “Literature in Korean and the Pleasures of Foreign Objects” (Munhakdongne The Quarterly, Fall 2009) 신해욱, 「이물감의 쾌락과 한국어-문학」, 『문학동네 2009 가을』 (문학동네, 2009년)  

by Im Seungyu

Reviews

[Featured Review] On the Eve of the Uprising

Hwang Jungeun debuted in the mid-aughts when South Korean literature was undergoing a profound change. Influenced by postmodernism, younger writers were jettisoning conventional ways of making fiction feel realistic. In Pak Min-gyu and Hye-young Pyun’s fiction, a video game raccoon came to life in a bathhouse, and ghoulish spirits loomed larger than living characters. Korean writers were also grappling with social upheaval more specific to the homeland in the long wake of the Asian Financial Crisis: the IMF bailout, neoliberal restructuring, and new forms of state violence in the post-authoritarian era. And as the government ramped up its efforts to promote Korean literature abroad, the postmillennial generation found itself balancing cosmopolitan aspirations with attention to local conditions.  Hwang’s first novel, One Hundred Shadows (tr. Yewon Jung, 2010), admirably met these challenges by fusing fanciful fabulism with the everyday conditions of marginalized lives. The story begins with a woman who is chasing her own shadow into the woods. The novel also contains lovingly detailed descriptions of a semi-derelict electronics market facing demolition. One Hundred Shadows was written in response to the Yongsan tragedy, in which residents occupied a building to protest plans to demolish and gentrify the district. The clash with the police led to six deaths and many more injuries. The incident became a defining example of how, even after the authoritarian era had ended, coercive power was being deployed to further enrich the economic elites.  dd’s Umbrella, which is Hwang’s seventh collection of fiction—comprising two novellas—also explores marginalization and dislocation in the face of redevelopment, but with an emphasis on the lives of sexual minorities. It notably lacks any fabulist conceit. The book was a response to another watershed event, tracing the tumultuous days leading up to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. In the first novella, titled “d,” the eponymous protagonist mourns the passing of their partner dd from a traffic accident. “d” begins with how they became a couple: During a storm, while still students, d lent dd an umbrella. At a reunion years later, dd lent d their umbrella. Through this ritual of reciprocity, their love was solidified. While d’s loss is profound, grief enlivens them to social energies. Their illiterate landlord shares harrowing stories of terror, violence, and sorrow from the Korean War. d tries first to get rid of dd’s vinyl collection, then honors their memory by listening to the records on full blast.  The second novella’s title “There is Nothing That Needs to Be Said” alludes to Osip Mandelstam’s poem of the same name, which questions the meaning of speech under tyranny. It is narrated by Kim Soyoung and set on the day the Constitutional Court will rule on the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in 2016. We are shown intimate glimpses of Soyoung and their partner Sookyung’s relationship, from the latter’s schooldays as a budding track star to their fateful reunion against the backdrop of the 1996 August Yonsei University incident, when students clashed with riot police to protest the government’s prohibition of their activities. The novella also doubles as a bibliophile’s love letter. Hwang nests her reflections on the materiality of books within a chapter largely about protest, thereby foregrounding the political possibilities inherent in writing and reading. The novella also unfolds Soyoung’s relationship with sister Sori and nephew Jung Jinwon. It is through the character of young Jinwon, who “adores pink” but parrots his teacher’s statement that “girls can’t marry girls,” that Hwang poses the question of how this momentous day will be remembered. Some readers may find the novel’s overall mood of melancholy and dread stifling. But Hwang also highlights possibilities of regeneration that won’t collapse into fantasies of fascist renewal. The Roland Barthes quote, “to live . . . is to receive the forms of life of the sentences that preexist us,” appears twice in the novel—likely a commentary on Marx’s critique of how capitalism has shaped our instrumentalist approach to life. Under capitalism, life is reduced to a way of maintaining one’s life. But the Barthes quote is suggesting that what also crucially sustains us are words (and LPs and umbrellas), which act as transformative agents of reciprocity and revitalization.  Translation also lends new form to our lives. e. yaewon, who has emerged as a prolific and judicious practitioner of the craft, renders Hwang’s style in a register quiet yet direct, contemplative yet of the heart, and immersive yet defamiliarized. dd’s Umbrella poses an unusual challenge with its non-binary pronouns and sections that insist on gender neutrality—easier to handle in Korean. Some may find the repetition of the characters’ full names stilted. The effect is somewhat strange in Korean too, but intentional; Soyoung is unsettling our hierarchical ideas about family relations by referring to their father or nephew by their legal name. In the first novella, the third-person narrative, as it slips into another character’s perspective, calls for a soft touch (“Listen, d heard one of the women say, the first time I saw people being slaughtered was in June of 1950 . . . I opened up the blanket and saw the child’s scalp was scorched”). Such elegiac moments are reminiscent of works by W. G. Sebald and Teju Cole in the best way, allowing the reader to slip dreamily between everyday experiences and historical trauma.  When I was in the fifth grade, a teacher once lowered her voice because the class had gotten too loud. As her voice grew quieter, so did the kids, whose attention she now commanded. Something similar happens to the reader immersed in e. yaewon and Hwang Jungeun’s prose. Its unassuming poise pulls you from the din of our hyperconnected present, not only for refuge or escape but for vital forms of life that are more than just means to life.

by Jae Won Edward Chung

LTI Korea Now

Kindred Seoul

I must begin with the bathtub. Perhaps it’s silly that a bathtub is where I want to start discussing a literary festival. But after a fourteen-hour flight from London, arriving in my hotel room and finding a stunning lion’s-foot bathtub felt like a minor miracle. Book tours are depleting spiritually, mentally, and physically, and it makes a big difference for the event host to consider authors as people. Out of so many literary festivals and book fairs I’ve participated in, Seoul International Writers Festival strikes me as by far the most people-oriented and author-centric event. Its goal is not just to sell or promote frontlist titles according to publication schedule, but to promote and celebrate authors, connect literary figures from across the globe, introduce international authors to Korean readers, and foster a closer conversation between Korean and world literature.  On the surface, writers today seem more connected than ever through social media and ease of travel; but the truth is that there are few opportunities to truly get to know peer artists. At SIWF, I discussed the particularities of Tolstoy and writerly ambition (“Is it okay to want validation for one’s art?”) with Jonas Hassen Khemiri, the acclaimed Swedish-American novelist. I befriended the critic Nam Seung-won, whose intimate knowledge of writers and artists was an invaluable peek into the Korean literary world. I was touched by the warmth and sincerity of the Korean novelist Kim Soom and the Japanese poet Yumi Fuzuki. At the opening night’s panel, the iconic Chinese author Yan Lianke moved me with his answer to the question, “Are you driven to write in order to resist censorship?” Lianke’s reply was calm but firm. “I am not a ‘writer of censored books,’ and I am not interested in censorship,” he said. “I am first and foremost interested in human beings.”   As an author, I think the fellowship with peer artists is one of the most important elements of a successful writing life. From a practical perspective, publishing depends so much on social networking, and this is true in every market, whether or not that’s “fair.” As books and careers cross borders, connections with diverse international writers can help grow one’s audience.  But more crucially, writerly fellowship offers inspiration and affirmation. By its very nature, writing can be solitary and isolating work. Not only that, publishing tends to foster the myth of a lone genius; there is only one person’s name on the cover of a book; and authors all know who they are competing against in an award season. Individuality is constantly upheld and celebrated in publishing. Rarely do we get a chance to see the big picture of authors, each in their own way, committing themselves to the same task just as a drop of rain joins the great ocean. It is both sobering and uplifting to see that one is not alone in the sometimes overwhelming work of creation. This is why a highlight of SIWF was seeing my fellow authors at various panels. Another highlight was the interactive sensorial exhibits, interpreting our books through smell, sound, and sight. I was especially delighted by the perfume inspired by my novel, City of Night Birds: it is a creamy white floral with a tuberose heart. Thoughtful installations like these deepen the readers’ experience of our books. In an age when people have easy entertainment at their fingertips, I believe that books cannot be “Netflix in a print-out form.” The text has to be art, first and foremost, but other layers surrounding it—from a beautiful cover and interior design to exhibits like these—can increase the book’s value into something irreplaceable and worthy of cherishing. Speaking of cherishing, I came home from the festival with a lovely souvenir: the bottle of Eau de City of Night Birds. Every time I smell it, I am reminded of teahouses along Insa-dong street; hot baths to unwind in after panels and receptions; the passion and warmth of full-house audiences; conversations with artists; and autumn in Seoul, a captivating ancient capital and a global publishing mecca.

by Juhea Kim

Reviews

[Review] White with Fear but Warm with Imagination

On Shin Hae-uk’s Natural History from the Edge of the Natural  Reading a single poem is completely different from reading a whole collection. Each poem in a collection guides the others, slowly clarifying your picture of the larger book. And as that image grows crisper, it finally reaches the poet. Reading a book of poems, more so than other forms, means drawing closer to the real-life poet, to the point that it’s hard to distinguish reading a collection from reading its creator. Yes, countless theories and all kinds of examples may say we have to separate a poem’s poet from its speaker—yet our hearts always bore through that stiff knowledge toward the poet. A poem’s elements are varied, but obviously the most prominent is its voice. And when we read a collection, we want to know the person the voice belongs to. The poetry in Shin Hae-uk’s first four books, as suggested by their titles—Precise Arrangement (2005), Biologicity (2009), syzygy (2014), and Caecilians (2019)—arranged their peculiar language with such lucid precision that they somehow made you feel you were growing further from her the more you read them. But what about her most recent collection, Natural History from the Edge of the Natural?  In the collection’s very first poem, titled “Sweep It Out and Start Over,” she writes: “this night is taking the place / of the night that should have been.” The present (“this night”) doesn’t seem to be the future the speaker imagined in the past (the “night that should have been”) and then, “trapped in that night” that didn’t come, and “swirling this night,” that same speaker decides to “sweep it all out and start over.” What did she decide to sweep out? And what did she decide to start over? Which is to say that the tonight that failed to be “that night” is already time that will never return. Natural History contemplates how even though humans exist in chronos—empty, homogeneous clock-time—our existence can break free from its workaday limits to reach a moment of awakening. The everyday recurs, but that which is lost in time’s flux can never come back. And we living humans are all headed toward loss, toward our own inevitable demise.  How can we bear the pain of our mortal lives, accompanied as they are by loss? Reading Shin’s “First Birthday of the An Sich,” you get the sense the poet wants a mind mature enough to shatter the rock of childhood memories (like fields overtaken by mugwort), then let them flow away between her palms like warm sand. Reading “Seconds,” she seems to be after a self-soothing that can quell the “sadness of urgency” by divvying up one’s time, as if literally “splitting seconds”—and then plunging into time’s numberless depths. We might call these the struggles of the human soul, faced with loss: both our striving to realize existence an sich, where only the present matters, as well as our attempts to wrap our heads around eternity by prolonging it forever.  And to invoke the collection’s title, we might also call these the tasks that lie at “the edge of the natural.” Four of the poems in Natural History from the Edge of the Natural have the same title as the collection itself. The phrase “natural history” jumps in from each. The living being’s task of facing their end by natural causes (illness, age, etc.) is their “jayeonsa” (自然死), a “natural death.” But “jayeonsa” is also homophonous with “natural history” (自然史), the term we use for nature’s flow, for the world’s underlying principles. The speaking “we” that appears in the four “Natural History” poems wanders a vast snowfield, lights a fire, then enters a warm hibernation that resembles death; and in the same way mortal flesh dies and returns to dust, that “we” also gets “transplanted” in “someone else’s earth,” and then, “born anew feet bare,” starts “feeling life eternal,” finally arriving at the principle that “life belong[s] to nature.” Can we humans, doomed to die, find comfort enough in realizing we’re merely part of nature? Though we know our bodies return to nature to be reborn in different forms, we nevertheless can’t avoid facing farewells great and small over the course of our lives. That first-person plural “we” keeps reappearing in these four poems, as well as a fair part of the other poems in Natural History. Both the coldly realistic sense of loss, that something we once had has vanished, and the plural speaker “we,” together narrowly retain the memory of how warmth feels.  Put more precisely, Shin’s “we” is actually closer to the singular. Phrases that recur across the poems “Shoeshine” and “Outlet” (“two . . . one,” “immersed in 1+1” or “1×1,” “sister brand,” “feel fissures wordlessly”) imply that the subject “we” isn’t an infinite, expansive plural, but rather a “two” that can never lose its “one”—that is, a “two become one.” Shin puts it this way in another poem, “The Great Gingko at the Temple of Literature in Seoul”: the feeling that “we’re one and the same, no you, no me”—that “you” and “I” can never be separated forever—offers a more humane way to grieve than the lofty belief that our finite human lives eventually return to the eternity of nature.  Much of the volume, and especially the hauntingly sad poem “Tour,” depicts that sensation of being a plural “we” from the perspective of a first-person singular speaker who’s “just riding a hearse.” “[G]et on, they said,” the poem begins; “someone told them to pick me up, again // let ’em on again, they said // and now i’m just riding a hearse.” The poem then delivers a catalogue of copywriting from the signs that enter the hearse-riding speaker’s view from beyond her window. But the “I” doing the speaking is simultaneously someone who has died, been cremated, then picked up by the hearse—and also a survivor dealing with someone else’s death whom the hearse has suddenly picked up, clutching their sack, staring numbly out the window: “get off they said / let me off i said / someone, me / someone, me.” The poem depicts both of their respective sensations as a single person’s—the moment of farewell in which both the departed and the survivor have no choice but to feel “scared pale,” as Shin puts it in the poem “Count.” It ends with the emotional lines, “a stoppable // and then a stoppable // but it’s unstoppable // unstoppability”: when the hearse stops, the moment for final parting has arrived. This moment is unavoidable. As Shin puts it in “The Great Gingko,” we have to face the vertiginous time when “since that night splitting seconds we’ve woken dazed.” While sad, cold, strange feelings predominate Natural History from the Edge of the Natural, as with all Shin’s poetry, it also has its moments of humor and warmth. For every poem where the first-person plural “we” appears, a group of “grandmas” often turns up, too—a word that always warms a reader’s heart, encompassing both age and youth, since we use it mainly in our childhoods. Neither the time in which one gets called Grandma, nor the physical time we have to call someone Grandma lasts long. And so that brief word, “grandma,” becomes a hazy signifier for the vigor of youth. The poem “Grandmas with Beautiful Foreheads, Grandmas” foregrounds grandmothers envisioned constantly unknotting traditional cloth bundles of stories, “blanketing the moors with lulla-lullabies.” But this poem’s “grandmas” don’t exist just in the speaker’s memories. When she asks the grandmothers, “would you please squeeze me in,” there among the “crookbacked little grannies hiding me,” she becomes one of the beautiful grandmas herself. Together with the grandmothers, the speaker once again offers a case where “two become one.”  Imagining an actual “us” set within this warm landscape may provide comfort far greater than that which comes from imagining the human perched “on the edge of the natural”—that is, as part of the natural. Shin’s poems tell us that we human beings, left with no choice but to suffer loss, must not desist from imagining warmly, with a “secondsplitting” heart, each instant, passionately, ceaselessly. The more we read and reread Natural History from the Edge of the Natural, the more clearly that voice rings out.   KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED: Shin Hae-uk, Precise Arrangement (Minumsa, 2005)신해욱, 『간결한 배치』 (민음사, 2005) Shin Hae-uk, Biologicity (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield, Black Ocean, 2024)신해욱, 『생물성』 (문학과지성사, 2009) Shin Hae-uk, syzygy (Moonji, 2014)신해욱, 『syzygy』 (문학과지성사, 2014) Shin Hae-uk, Caecilians (Moonji, 2019) 신해욱, 『무족영원』 (문학과지성사, 2019) Shin Hae-uk, Natural History from the Edge of the Natural(Spring Day Books, 2024)신해욱, 『자연의 가장자리와 자연사』 (봄날의책, 2024)

by Cho Yeonjung