Poet's words

Part 1: Only Summer Existed

An Unfamiliar Face / A Handshake / Arche's Sleep / An Illustrated Guide to Humanity / Jormungand's Belt / A Collection of Prenatal Dreams / A Dawning Dream / Santa Claus in Kansas / The Bed of Procrustes / But Therefore / The Sun Infected with Cloudphobia and the Sleepless Tivoli Gardens, But a Perfect Wooden Horse Except for One / A Day in the Life of a Symbolist / The Historian / The Origin of Species

Part 2 The innocently falling child becomes countless celestial bodies

How to Read Mermaid Clouds / Eden's Butterfly Dreams / Geppetto's Forest / Poetry Collection / White Noise / Indigo Flight / The Whereabouts of Asteroid 09A87E / Humidity / Albino Humans / The End of Boyhood / Methuselah's Ark Moving Left, Noah's Carnival Hidden in a Vine Nest / Tropical Night / July 28th / A Planet Suffering from Phantom Pain and the Spontaneous Birth of Daedalus' Children

Part 3 Just like the family I drew just now

Dear Sister / Pygmalion of Loss / Pencil / Childhood Sketch / Wandering Matilda / July 7th / Back and forth / District 8 / Dumgae Village / Your Neverland / Twin naps at the daycare / Mailbox / Loraban tablets 0.5mg / Tetris adaptation period / Joker's slapstick tendencies

Part 4: You Can't Miss a Lover Without Having One

Parallel Worlds / Greetings to Mr. Anybody / The Evolution of Interviews / Your and My Deformedly Cyclic Snowfield, and Paradise or Siamese Twins / Fresh Death / Festival / Ylang-Ylang / An Afternoon Crumpling Amedeo Modigliani's Paintings / The Sun's Bookmark Unfolding the Afternoon / Hello, Stranger / Summer in Fomalhaut / The Hologram Banana / The Insomnia of Mr. Marsala, Who Can Be Measured / The Dreaming Moby Dick

Preface | Rolling Out Dangerous and Unstable Sentences
Jang Ok-gwan (poet)

Nothing disappears
It's just that things that seep into the night are getting darker

The 146th poetry collection of the Munhakdongne Poetry Collection is published.
This is a poetry collection by poet Kim Hee-jun, who debuted in 2017 through 『Poet’s Village』.
"Because in my sister's country, no one withers."
Poet Kim Hee-jun.
The poet was born in Tongyeong, Gyeongnam on September 10, 1994, so he is 26 years old this year.
The poet passed away on July 24, 2020, at the age of twenty-six, in an unexpected accident.
So, this is the poet's posthumous collection of poems.
The poet's first poetry collection, published on the poet's birthday and forty-nine days after his death, was passed around among us without the poet.
A poetry collection that makes you feel endlessly touched by the fact that it is possible and inevitable.
This is a poetry collection by poet Kim Hee-jun, 『Because no one withers in my sister's country』. I try to hold on to the comma at the end of the title, but even if that is the case for whatever reason, as the poet says, it is a poetry collection that I cannot help but read with a heartbreaking sense of bewilderment, regardless of the reason.


What on earth could it have been for?
Poet Kim Hee-jun's 'Because,' which I keep looking for and reading because I can't tell exactly what he's talking about.
“Brother, we were abandoned. Brother, you were stealing a glance at the Brothers Grimm’s diary, and I was writing down that day’s diary, saying that the world was one you wanted to stab with a needle. And the tongues we shared on the other side of the jungle gym tasted rusty because of that reason” (“White Noise”), or “The reason we let go of each other that day was because it was the night we came to abandon our bodies from Earth” (“The Planet with Phantom Pain and the Children of Daedalus Who Are Born Spontaneously”), or “The sleeves were full of dead seasons, and I couldn’t tell what was growing in the gaps. I pretended not to notice the flower petals I put in my pocket because in my sister’s country, no one withers” (“Dear Sister”), or “It’s more common than you think to pour down rain, so it’s not strange to get bruised. The reason I, standing on my head, could be abandoned by the sun was because Gunnera didn’t stop breathing” (“The Daycare’s Twin Nap”). The poet repeats this ‘because,’ four times in four poems.
If you underline and read it over and over again, you will easily guess that this 'because,' is not an expression of my own subjective attitude of facing reality with an upright and upright posture and enduring illusions, rather than an attribution of blame or passing the buck for my given situation.

Take a look at the poet's poems, divided into four parts.
Let's first look at the poet's bold, blunt titles in this collection of 57 poems.
“Summer just existed” (from “Handshake”).
“The innocently falling child becomes countless celestial bodies” (“The Planet with the Illusion Pain and the Spontaneously Born Children of Daedalus”).
“Just like the family I drew just now” (from “Pencil”).
“I could only miss my lover if I didn’t have one” (Greetings to Mr. Anybody).
Poet Kim Hee-jun, who, in the midst of such chaos and uncertainty as to where his poetry collection was headed, uncompromisingly stirred up his poetic heart with his characteristic honesty and liveliness, and danced to the rhythm of poetry, fully displaying his poems.
If we try to infer and extract keywords that run through this collection of poems just from the title, 'death', 'childhood', 'family', and 'women' come out.
A poet who was busy tying together the great and broad themes of poetry, the deep and lofty themes of poetry, the themes that always come to mind at the beginning and end, with strings in all directions and playing with rubber bands here and there.
It may be greed, but the poet must have been overwhelmed by the world he faced, as he was born with an explosive energy within him that he didn't know what to do with.

Poet Kim Hee-jun is the owner of language that is both very hot and very cold.
Through his unique poems, we can easily guess that he trusted and loved the language of his body, to the point of getting out of the bathtub and saying "Ah" to the lukewarm temperature in between, without knowing how to adjust to that temperature.
The poet's language runs, the poet's language falls, the poet's language rolls, the poet's language jumps, the poet's language embraces, the poet's language pushes away, the poet's language freezes, the poet's language burns.
Poet Kim Hee-jun, who had a natural ability to pursue lightness while blurring the focus of his poetry and at times had a purpose, knew how to find the tail of life's futility, grab it, and swing it around.

Nothing disappears
It's just that things that seep into the night are getting darker

My eyes are drawn to these two passages from my debut work, “How to Read Mermaid Clouds.”
The density of the smear, not the disappearance.
So, juggling these two worlds of mythological obsession and fairytale imagination, he could blurt out phrases like “Summer is waiting for you anyway” (“July 28”).
“We eat egg soup for breakfast. Let’s keep it a secret that we hear a crunching sound every time an egg bursts in our mouths” (“Unfamiliar Face”).
He must have shared these things with us as if whispering in our ears.
The handshake the poet extends with this collection of poems.
Would you like to read the poem of the same name, “Handshake”?
He said, “I spent the whole day trying to grasp the muscles of the rain,” and this is how he concludes this poem.
“There I am, standing on my head and lifting the world. My hands are bright with nail marks from catching the raindrops. The blisters have burst, but there is no water or house on my palms. Only summer exists.”
Will this 'summer' of ours disappear?
Will this 'existence' of ours disappear?
Even without us, this summer will last forever, and even without us, this existence will remain silent.
By believing in that and having hope in that, we can let go of our attachment to existence and nonexistence and abandon our pettiness.

I read and reread the poet's words.
“See you in the Olive Orchard.”
I touch and touch the olive-colored poetry book again.
Even if the Olive Garden is not here now, it will be there someday, if the poet wants to meet it.
Let's close the poetry collection with the warmth and beauty that stirs up excitement and anticipation as much as the words "Let's meet", but it is not easy to do so because the postscript that poet Jang Ok-gwan added at the end of the poetry collection is painful.
I believe that the story that accurately and transparently portrays the poet Kim Hee-jun and the person Kim Hee-jun is enough to serve as an essential 'side' as you move through this poetry collection.
Just like the end of poet Jang Ok-gwan's preface, I would like to end this article with this sentence.
This is what poet Kim Hee-jun said in the internet magazine 『Webzine Poet's Square』.
It can be said that engraving everything is a prayer for the repose of the soul.

“I have something to say to all poets.
I love you very much.
It's something I've always thought about, but I never got a chance to bring it up.
Teacher, I really like poetry.
I think about it desperately every day.
“I really cherish and love you.”

Poet Kim Hee-jun must have returned to “Asteroid 09A87E.”
No, he still stays on this star.
September 10th, the day this poetry collection comes out.
She believes that on her twenty-sixth birthday and the forty-ninth day of her life, she will return to her planet with her husband's wife in her arms.
So, we should not summon poet Kim Hee-jun with the language and emotions of the Earth.
I have to think of him when I look at the stars floating in the night sky.
A bright smile, like the last note he left to his mother, saying, “Mom, I’m good, I like everything.”
─Jang Ok-gwan's preface, from "The Call of Dangerous and Unstable Sentences"


[Poet's Note]

See you at the Orchard of Olives

September 10, 2020
Kim Hee-jun