Poet's words

Part 1

A picture | Park closing time | Order | From a very long time ago | Things everyone will know someday | Bell | Line | Thick | Train ticket | Dizzy | Heavy snow | Like that | Today's possibility

Part 2

Have you ever loved someone this much | To youth | Take off the watch and shake it | Love | Love | People, tangerines | I'll look after your house | The sea I wanted | The daytime moon | A month | Tail | The wind and the bag | I know | The ship of loss | You can't maintain a relationship just because you've known each other for a long time | A reading session | A target | To the body | The smell of the earth | Under the shade of a rose tree | Colored leaves

Part 3

The Snows of Kilimanjaro | We all go to the sea, but | We are all in the middle, unable to shake it off | A wad of double-sided paper | The birth of an umbrella | A resume | To a young poet | To you who is trying to learn Korean from afar | When I lay dead | One wing and the other wing | Worries about the role | A white bear appeared | The train departs from Qingdao | A friend | Hassan | Humans practice | The first day in the world when I shed the boy's shell | A close-cut connection | Someone asked if they could buy me a drink | The heart is a crab | To the boy

Part 4

Cliffs on the beach | Isn't this all about untying knots? | Swing | A forehead mark on a shop window | A brief curtain story | Ventilation | Autumn post office | Moving day | Letting me sleep, and parting is a bonus | I like pieces | What I want | A heart that doesn't want to see | Missing | At the airport

commentary
Ever Loved, Ever Loved · Lee Kwang-ho

The poet, who said that upon receiving the offer to publish this collection of poems, “I immediately left for where the snow falls” (from “The Poet’s Note”), chooses to be buried in the snow that never melts in order to dig up the love that held him captive.
His love does not dig up traces of the past or wait for a future that never comes.
Just leave a place for love to reside.
In fact, the love poetry collection was also a long-standing request from a senior poet.
Poet Heo Su-gyeong, who taught him the word ‘you’ and wrote the commentary for the poetry collection ‘Chanran’ (Munhak-kwa-Jiseongsa, 2010).
It is said that during his lifetime, he spoke to Lee Byeong-ryul in Berlin, Germany about love poetry.
The poet, who believes that promises between people must be kept, has finally completed a 'collection of love poems' by gathering together, piece by piece, the moments of love that he had long cherished but had to lose.
So, you, wind, brilliance, inn, sea, alone, happiness and separation, 'love', which has been replaced with countless words in his poetry and prose, 'love', which has been constantly hesitating and faltering, has just arrived before the readers.

If there is not even one foot to step on
Even without a single hand to pull you

Have you ever loved someone this much?
I've been so hungry that I almost fainted in front of a dying plant.
I've cried at the train station
Even if this feeling is a disease and is ridiculed,
I used to wonder what the big deal was
Every day the sunlight is short and there was a time when you were lacking
I've thought about qualifications, wondering how far I can go with this.
I have imitated one person and enthusiastically agreed with him
It makes me not know what to do
There were times when I even lost the belief that I could change.
Finally, I will be the first to arrive at the place you left me
The enemy who held onto eternity
- Full text of "Have you ever loved someone this much?"

Since love has no causal relationship, attempts to prove it are almost useless.
The speaker of the title poem, "Have You Ever Loved Someone This Much?", painfully reveals the fact that love does not belong in the realm of perfection.
The countless 'enemies' (experiences) that the speaker speaks of are neither things that have already passed nor things that will happen in the future, but rather acts that exist in themselves.
Literary critic Lee Gwang-ho said, “In this poem, there is only a list of those ‘times,’ and not a single sentence is completed,” and that the potential of this poem is “not a level of choice between things that have already been realized, but a state before it is realized, an unknown situation where we do not know what will appear or happen.”
In this way, for poet Lee Byeong-ryul, love is “inspiration that arises from each other” and is closer to something that “no one can untangle” (“Park Closing Time”).
If “my image begins to appear in the scenery reflected in your eyes” (“Dense”), then love has already fulfilled its role.
Before finding the meaning of love, “holding on to fall apart together” (“Heavy Snow”).
Even if the eternity I was trying to grasp was an uncertain unknown, even that hesitation was embraced in an instant like a heavy snowfall.

There is a world of hesitant, vague, and stammering words, where the body senses that a love affair has occurred, but cannot fully comprehend its contents.
There is a world of words that are slow because they cannot decipher the 'code of life'.
But those slow words may actually surpass the more agile ones in discovering the rhythm of love that may be in the 'backstage' of life.
And this is Byeongryul Lee.
The moment when words become slow is when the rhythm of the heart begins.
- Lee Gwang-ho, commentary from “Ever Loved, Ever Will Love”

You asked why I was sad
I asked why I wasn't sad.

I didn't ask the girl if she had ever learned about love through writing.
I took the yarn out of my backpack again and cut off one foot with my teeth.
He motioned for me to wrap it around his wrist three times and tie it up.
I didn't know if it was me or Sowon's bones wrapped in yarn.
The ball of yarn fell and rolled on the market floor, as if the wish could not become a large ball of yarn.
I thought about binding the two feet of the boy soldier who was shot last night to my feet, which were swollen from traveling.

- "Closely cut connection part"

The narrator, who encounters a girl selling yarn on a Ukrainian market street, does not ask why she is selling yarn in the sweltering heat of over 40 degrees Celsius.
Thinking of the older brother of a girl selling fur mittens in neighboring Georgia, I can only imagine the impossible, such as “flying around with fur wrapped around his body” and “landing in a human embrace, not on bare ground.”
The poet is overcome with a feeling of being “already in a dead world” (“I Know”), but then he goes back to Qingdao to ponder the safety of a mother and child who have no train tickets, and promises to go and hold the hand of a stranger from Sweden.
A face that looks painful for some reason, and whenever something seems to be going to happen, I just stand there dumbfounded and cry several times.
In short dialogues such as “You asked me why I was sad//I asked why I wasn’t sad” (from “Cliff on the Beach”), the poet’s pure and simple heart, that everyone in the world is precious and pitiful, is contained.
In this way, Lee Byeong-ryul's poetry, just like yesterday, observes the place of people and quietly maintains its loneliness.
A person who chooses to trust strangers they meet in a foreign land rather than be wary of them.
The poet's hope for the future is to "never again be astonished by the strangeness of life" while frequently getting lost, dying, and having something leak out no matter how much he puts in his vessel.
The humble attitude of not asserting the life one has lived becomes a pledge to “forget what time it is now” (“Command”), even if love is often lost, love often dies, and the love one has stored up throughout the winter keeps leaking out.

So then my role is
A bird with one wing attached

I was a stand-in for one person
People saw me and recognized me.
I pretended to be that person too
Because I didn't hate it

[… … ]

I was in one place, focused on the ordinary, but even that was ordinary, and I was a substitute who had lost the strength to sustain even that.
Until when will I
Can this right to be naked and the ecstasy of being naked continue?

- The "What I Want" section

We act as if we are the masters of love, but to the poet who believes in eternity, we are all just stand-ins for love.
For him, love is a temporary act of playing a role or imitating someone else's life.
The poet, who knows that after love ends, he “becomes a person who speaks a different language” (“Target”) and “a character who once again ponders when it will end” (“Contemplation on the Role”), “begins to love love.”
It is about enjoying the ecstasy of love with the attitude that any role is okay.
Sometimes love may not show up at the promised place, and we may continue to be confused and rationally misunderstand ourselves, but we know that the “code of life” can only be solved by “sensing love” (“Things Everyone Will Know Someday”).
For Lee Byeong-ryul, love is the key to solving war, pandemics, environmental pollution, blame, and hatred.
The poet, who “kept the window open and never closed it” (back cover text) with the thought that love might knock on the door again, is still trying to “fit the keys one by one into every crack in the world you live in” (「Ventilation」).
In an age where love is stingy, poet Lee Byeong-ryul, who takes on the role of a love substitute, leans on his wings and reflects on his delicate poetic language. This will give us the strength to love again.

Poet's words

After receiving an offer to publish a poetry collection, I immediately left for a snowy place.
Buried in the snow, it remained there until the day of return passed.
The title of this poetry collection suddenly came to mind at that moment.
At the same time, I smelled the snow, and even while I was smelling it, I missed the smell of snow so much.

Poetry is like that
Love is like that

People who dance with the purpose of dancing
A person who is dancing without knowing it,
To be clear, all of my illnesses fall into the latter category.

April 2024
Lee Byeong-ryul