Poet's words

Part 1 We gave each other our futures

Box/ Therefore, therefore/ White emotion - Desert of Uyuni/ Ice fragment/ Slowly and slowly/ Lips/ Travel blur/ Reflux esophagitis/ Winter dream/ Are you the first snow/ Without knowing/ This poor eye/ You could not go beyond/ Such December/ Evening door

Part 2 was so beautiful that I felt so sorry that I had to say something else.

Is it really soft/ Because the leaf at 10 o'clock cannot say sorry to the leaf at 11 o'clock/ Is it a thing? - Edward Hopper / Vertigo / Wrapping sadness/ With discomfort/ Disposable spring/ The silence of the apricot tree was long and I grew old/ Cafe at noon/ Two doors - René Magritte/ From wall to wall/ I bent the rose/ Goodbye convenience store/ Reasons for coming to the window/ Fog that year

Part 3 Two shakes and two levels

After/ Cold/ Amazing thing, virus/ Species/ Genetics/ The reason why sound returns sound/ Sea/ Paper flower/ To her/ To the land of glass/ April snow/ In the end we know it/ Ice/ Crying/ Ghosts/ That year's teacher's office/ Heavy snow

Part 4 I Don't Know I'm Gone

There will be no thoughts / Eve / Autism / Third sister / Did Bacon like bacon / When lives meet at the entrance and exit / Between here and there / The way of gauze / If it is an unknown world / Eyes / Potatoes remind me of things that are not potatoes / Seriously / And winter,

Commentary | Inside and Outside You
| Jo Dae-han (literary critic)

“Whenever something happens or I feel something, I remember white.”
White, it looks like it went all the way
A question as brilliant as the first white light I witnessed: "Are you the first snow?"

The 151st poetry collection of the Munhakdongne Poetry Collection is the fourth poetry collection by poet Lee Gyu-ri.
It's been six years since "That's the Best".
There are still many readers who remember the loneliness and bittersweet humor contained in poems that acknowledge that there are moments in life when one must simply observe, experiencing the powerlessness of words.
At the end of a year when we are enveloped in a strange sentiment, in December when we look forward to and await the first snow, this new poetry collection, with a title that contains that sentiment, is very similar to a passage from poet Lee Gyu-ri's prose collection, "The Footsteps of Poetry," which is a collection of poetic moments.
“If I could live with the feeling of looking at snow, if I could love with the heart when touching snow, if I could die with the stillness when snow disappears.” The poetry collection, “Are You the First Snow,” contains transparent things, incomprehensible things, meaningless things, beautiful things, and still things, and our senses when looking at and touching the pouring snow.


They left the boxes behind.

The spring left downstairs
The promise I left downstairs
The question left downstairs
I left you downstairs
Take all the ones downstairs

I don't open that box

When I first put to sleep the sadness and hunger of the flowers that came
When the cold relationship quietly fades away

If you think about it, possibility wasn't that far away.
_「Box」Special

The 'box' in the 'box' in the introduction of the poetry collection contains spring, promise, questions, and you.
The flowers have withered and the relationship has ended, so I will not open that box.
If I continue like that, “mumbling along in a daze/ speechless/ becoming this new beginning,” won’t my existence as “Who am I/ Am I someone I know?” fade, and won’t I become blinded by “this is a petal/ this is infinity/ all meaning is dazzling with meaninglessness”? (“White Emotions - Desert of Uyuni”) Is that all? I can keep the box from being opened, but forgetting doesn’t seem to be that easy.
The more you don't want to see or forget something, the more you can't help but see it, and there's nothing you can't forget. That memory sometimes "often flowed back alive/ you/ the idea/ the beauty."
The poet writes that this method of “shaken the future between incomprehensible doors” in retrograde time is a kind of “paradoxical method” that reverses the positions of inside and outside (“Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease”).


The 61 poems in this collection are embedded in every corner with areas that have no connection to each other and sentences that constantly vibrate between them.
Right and wrong, outside the window and inside the window, Sahara and tundra, inside and outside the crack in the door, two doors, etc., these too will be connected to the 'method of paradox'.
“I want to tell a story that no one listens to,” but “I can’t tell a story that no one listens to” (“Unknown Bird”), and because “the impossible that is possible anytime, anywhere/the impossible that is possible anytime, anywhere,” these two worlds, however, “cannot go,” become the driving force that drives the world of Lee Gyu-ri’s poetry as places where one endlessly “wants to go” (“Winter Dream”).


Like the box beyond that has led countless people to the destruction of existence, you will always be before me.
And then it will continue to fascinate me with the dreamlike world beyond the threshold.
The problem is that I, here and now, have no way of knowing what might be out there.
Even though it may seem infinitely transparent, as if within reach, the world beyond what we see here will change in an unpredictable way, and the moment we open the box's lid, an unfamiliar light that will bleach our previous world will pour down unprotected, so the invisibility and uncertainty of that future will remain.
_From the coarse commentary "Inside and Outside You"

The images of winter and white that we encounter throughout the poetry collection are at their best in the title poem.
What is perishable and therefore useless will be the eyes, the mind, and the first sight.
The poet writes as if it were his duty to speak of that futility.


A horse that has endured for so long that its bones are all broken
Someone takes it out with difficulty
The appearance of what has gone all the way is white and white again
You, my heart that is finally trembling,

Sadness can't be called sadness
I can't say yesterday was far away
Moreover, you can't call nothingness nothingness
It was the first snow
_「Are you the first snow」 part

About gazing at and recording “the empty space where some say it is the first snow and others say it is not the first snow, and grope again about the scattered futility.”
“A horse that has endured for so long that its bones are all broken” It is “white and white again” because it “has gone all the way.”
About the person who “gathers and puts things in a room” knowing that they will disappear the moment they touch, and about the beautiful recording of those things that fail, collapse, and leave on the ground of the void that they face after that impossible accumulation.
“Winter is not at fault // You find your own pain point // I will be isolated // with a sadness I don’t even know the cause of // I will defend it at the risk of my life” (「And Winter」) asks us as he presents us with a collection of poems that shatters brightly like the white light we first witnessed.
Are you, the first snow?

Poet's words

I die little by little.

That I won't be able to open my eyes.
That I won't open my eyes.
That no good will come of it.
Only uncertainty will rule me.

Even in death, flowers bloom and you escape.

December 2020
Lee Gyu-ri