Poet's words

Part 1 I will tell you again in the language of trees.
Clinamen
The analogy of analogy
Voice Eternal Coast
Feeling helped
connection point
Find the key
禍彬
My sister's poem
Think about it to death
Coca-Cola
Babel
I don't know what scene is in your sleeping eyes
Repetition and listing

I'll give you pain in the form of a second gift
Hishi
Perfect Blue
Love must be purple
1g of soul
Call Me By Your Name
Happy End
Queen's Summer
About everything and nothing and everything else
Atlas
The day we almost died
non-mysterious
tilting tendency
graduate
Proposal 1

Part 3 This will be a murder recording machine.
blood, po
Fiction Diary
People who believe in God
?
To Somyeong
discharge
The form of humility
slaughter
0's governor
The air flowing between the 0 and the old man and the director
Play 0
faith
Blessing
Yeongsong

Part 4: Forgetting Your Hands and Feet and Becoming Clean
ark
eternity
Red Dog and Red Dog Touch
collection
A girl named Hope
◇
One Blue Evening
A beautiful and heavy book
cotton
Sleeping Bear, Salt St. Marie
然
Approaching the center, escaping in the way of color

commentary
Poetry Slam, Baek Eun-seon and Yang Gyeong-eon

That it must be alive, that it must not disappear
Baek Eun-seon's hot and cold love to protect herself and the world

I think I've thought a lot about what it means to live, endure, and continue to live as a woman.

I feel like I'm not very good at fitting in with life, and I often remind myself to never lose sight of the constant dissonance between life and myself, that tiny gap.

―Baek Eun-seon, from an interview with Channel Yes in March 2021

Baek Eun-seon, who began her career by winning the 2012 Munhak-kwa-sa New Writer's Award, has published her third poetry collection, "Feeling Helped" (Munhak-kwa-jisungsa, 2021).
Baek Eun-seon, who won the Kim Jun-seong Literary Award for the “Best First Original Collection” for her first poetry collection, “Possible World” (2016), which was filled with seething poetry, continued to inscribe sadness and anxiety into the overflowing sentences of her second poetry collection, “A Film Made of Scenes No One Remembers” (2019).
She is also meeting more readers by publishing a collection of essays that honestly reveal her true self as a poet, writer, worker, and mother.
In "Feeling Helped," Baek Eun-seon creates a beautiful pattern layer by layer by building up and then tearing down her broken heart, as if creating a map of lost memories.
If the first poetry collection was a diary of “our exhausted self” (Jo Yeon-jeong, commentary on the first poetry collection) who could only scribble in the hope that everything would end in the midst of a despair that seemed to never end, and if the second poetry collection was a film that connected forgotten scenes, this poetry collection seems like a record of the small fights that take place every day.
The poet does not easily compromise, as he continues to doubt poetry and himself.
Don't run away from today.


There is a saying that honest people suffer losses, so does that mean that honest poetry also suffers losses?
Baek Eun-seon is the poet I know who writes poetry closest to the voice.
It feels so close to the human body that its elaborate craftsmanship is obscured.
Actually, this is not a loss or anything.
It simply means that his poetry is closer and more deeply conveyed to us than we expected.
Baek Eun-seon's poetry is about being so close to life that it feels like you're suffocating because you're so happy about it.

It looks raw, but it is surprisingly delicate work of art, and it is a clear voice and a powerful image at the same time.
Here lies a unique realm of poetry that has never existed in Korean poetry and is unlikely to exist again in the future.
Therefore, reading Baek Eun-seon's poetry can be said to be a kind of witnessing.
It is to be a witness who remembers and hears the form of that desperate confession, and to be a witness who witnesses the events that take place in Korean poetry.
Hwang In-chan (poet)


A confession so vivid and so incredibly close

Some events twist the angle of the soul, and there are twists that can never be corrected.
If you go through those moments multiple times, you won't be able to go back.
―The "1g of Soul" section

Baek Eun-seon's poetry unfolds unforgettable memories and long-held emotions in many layers.
The landscapes of Baek Eun-seon's poetry, painted not with heavy words filled with meaning but with sentences that overlap lightly like boiling bubbles, fluttering snowflakes, and the sound of pouring rain, are desolate but beautiful.
But in this collection of poems, the individual decisions that make up the layers seem even clearer.
In an interview conducted after the publication of the prose collection, the poet said that the poems included in “Feeling Helped” were written “in a way that breaks the taboos I have placed on myself as much as possible and moves forward.”
As the saying goes, the poems in this collection seem to distance themselves from the techniques of poetic creation and from things that society has instilled as taboos, either through the poets themselves or through the creators.
The sentences, which are laid out openly, reveal the process of writing poetry.
“What is poetry//Sister, I have no curiosity/That’s what I’m most curious about, but can I write poetry without even knowing that?” (Sister’s Poetry).
The speaker of this collection of poems is a person who holds onto memories and “stays and makes up stories,” whatever poetry may be.
Memories are “close to the truth and identical to lies” because they are direct experiences but have already faded from the past.
“I want to have something more real/real than my memories,” so in the poem, “I try hard to gather up/the broken pieces of memory/and try desperately to restore/and make a fuss,” but “I can’t know anything and I’m absorbed in the temperature and the void that just can’t be conveyed,” and “I bite my fingernails and say I’m sad, I’m sad… but in the end, I’ll confess that I don’t know anything” (“Summer of the Queen,” “1g of Soul”).
Baek Eun-seon's poetry tells us that the wounds between those confessions "become clearer as time passes" ("Love seems to be purple") and that she knows "how easily something like a promise can be broken" ("Form of Humility").
Readers will likely feel a strange sense of comfort whenever they encounter the pure honesty scattered throughout the poetry collection.
For someone who reads poetry because they want to understand and be understood, what they need is not the rationalization that the world is warm and beautiful, but the pain of embracing pain.



I write while living, not dead

I would do anything to be at peace and safe.
It is not the comfort of quiet happiness.

It was something that could only be achieved through burning passion and struggle.
Now I know it.
―From “I Like, I Dislike, and I’m Strange”

Let's live long without flowers or fruit

Without becoming anyone's flower

In a place where you don't have to say sorry
―The “Connection Point” section

The 53 poems included were written between 2016 and 2020, after the publication of the first poetry collection.
The world that seemed to be ending has not ended, and it still seems to be hovering somewhere on the verge of apocalypse.
In the meantime, many social changes have occurred, and there have been incidents that poets have had to witness firsthand, such as the hashtag movement against sexual violence within the literary world (“Wherever I faced, there were many backs turned, and I had no choice but to witness everything with eyes that could not be closed,” “Poet’s Writings”).
After the events, rather than hoping for an abstract end that will never come, we seem to have come to endure this miserable world for each other and try to change it for the better.
I cautiously guess that this may be the reason why Baek Eun-seon tried to look at the familiar way of thinking in a completely new way.
The poet asks whether what many have called art is really art (“Isn’t it funny/that every woman was or will be twenty-one/that she will suffer/that the eye that sees calls it art”, “Clinamen”; “That poem is not about sadness, that poem/is a poem that asserts sadness and attacks people with sadness”, “Forms of Humility”).
There are records that can only be written in the form of a confession.
“We, exhausted,” who felt helpless while looking down from afar ("Clinamen"), gain strength by recording from the ground.
This collection of poems, which takes a step outside of oneself while projecting personal and social change, feels like a kind of growth period when read together with the previous collection of poems.
Someone said long ago that Baek Eun-seon's poetry "does not have both feet on the ground" ("Moon Skin," prose from her second poetry collection) is now wrong.
Baek Eun-seon, who has been able to say through this poetry collection that “it is okay to live without worrying about usefulness,” will not harden but will flow.
And I will record the little fights of each day.
“Don’t give up/Please win//So that I can think freely/So that I can move as I think” (“The Day We Almost Died”).

For the poet, the past is not something that has ended, but rather a time period that constitutes the bones of the present. Therefore, in poetry, the lies of the past are all summoned to explore the truth of the present.
Even in the moment of restoration, what is important is that the 'I' of the present, who can interpret the past differently, must remain distinctly alive and must not disappear.
The voice that refuses to back down even a little from now on, “living without dying” and “rewriting everything” with only the power of its own voice, is happening here, at the site of ‘Poetry Slam, Baek Eun-seon.’
Yang Gyeong-eon (literary critic)


Interview with Poet Baek Eun-seon

Q.
How does it feel to have published your third poetry collection? I'm also curious about what you're up to these days.
: I still can't quite believe it, I'm a bit confused but also relieved.
I've been a bit busy lately with two books coming out in quick succession, but I'm going to class, playing with my kids, and reading books as usual.

Q.
There is a line in the poem, “I feel close to the truth and the same as a lie” (“1g of Soul”). How honest do you think you are when you write poetry?
: When I write poetry, I feel like I'm being completely honest and at the same time not being honest at all.
The language of poetry is more about reconstructing truth to fit the aesthetics of the genre of poetry that I envision, rather than being honest.

Q.
What are the unique characteristics of “Feeling Helped” compared to your previous two poetry collections?
: It has better features.
It's also the thickest.
(Laughs) I tried to break away from the way I used to write and actively create fully expressed abstractions, but I don't know if it worked out well.
So I was worried that you might feel a bit opaque.
However, I tried to write freely because I thought that clarity is not the standard for making a poem good or bad.

Q.
There are two poems in my first collection of poems with the title “Mystery,” and there are poems with the same title in this collection as well.
I remember considering it as the title of my first poetry collection.
What does “non-mystery” mean to poet Baek Eun-seon?
: I thought that 'not being mysterious' actually had a huge mystery and a point of overlap, and I tried to lean towards that part to capture it.
Although the three poems are not organically related to each other, they seem to function as a single genre within me.
The genre of non-mystery.

Q.
I'm curious about your favorite poem from "Feeling Helped" and why.
: It's hard to choose a favorite poem, but today I'd like to choose "The Plan of Analogy."
It's the most painful poem I've ever written, so it's memorable.
It's a truly painful poem, filled with feelings of helplessness, despair, sadness, and misery.
It's like an autobiography of pain.

Q.
The cover illustration perfectly matches the poetry collection! It was drawn by novelist Song Ji-hyun.
I'm curious as to what led you to entrust it to me.
: Song Joo-hyun, who took the photos for the prose collection, and Song Ji-hyun, who drew the illustrations for the poetry collection, are sisters.
He is the person I cherish the most.
One day, after handing over the manuscript for the poetry collection, the three of us were lying down, rolling around, each looking at our cell phones, and muttering to ourselves, “Who should I entrust the illustrations for the poetry collection to?” Novelist Song Ji-hyun said, “Me,” and I said, “Okay.”
So naturally I decided, 'I should leave it to Jihyun.'

Q.
Please tell us about your future plans.
: My future plans are to faithfully complete my immediate deadlines and lead a peaceful life, so I have decided to cut down on drinking.
After publishing my collection of essays, I received more requests for prose than for poetry, so I felt a lot of pressure to meet deadlines.
But prose manuscripts are paid a lot of money.
So I've received everything for now, what should I do?


"I couldn't fall asleep again one night when someone knocked on the door.
I couldn't release the fist that was clutching my heart.
Now my island has become a question of eternity and a form for dissonance.
The sound of tapping, the sound travels through the blood vessels and echoes endlessly throughout the body.
The place I faced was full of backs turned away, and I had no choice but to witness everything with eyes that could not be closed.
The island, tired of waiting, took out a stone from its pocket and threw it on the ground.
What I believed to be the most beautiful thing.

Nothing is fixed
That's important to me"

Spring 2021
Baek Eun-seon