Poet's words

Part 1: Questions You Can Always Ask

Writing on the pond / Glass box / Pain / Momentary stop / Bare feet / Sand grave / Compassion / About the heart / Tie the boat / The day I want to go into exile with you / Bukcheon / A season spent in the paradise garden / The depth of cabbage / White-necked plover / A walk / Love song / Simple and clear

Part 2: Raising the height of flowers, that's it

Waiting for the bird/ Rooster/ The story of being stung by a bee/ From March to May/ Copying the sound of water/ Raising a flower garden a span/ North Gate/ Bukchon/ Greetings/ Song of a Mountain Journey/ In the shade of the dogwood blossoms/ A fleeting feeling/ I do not know/ A standing pond/ Nails/ Sewing in the shade/ About two thousand won worth of turnip seeds/ A person pulling out weeds

Part 3 Winter is long and the flock of whooper swans is not simple

Chrysanthemum / Peony / Red bottlebrush / Studying math / Walking with a fox / Gopyeong Station / Night snow / Questions and graves / The sound of my father sweeping snow with a broom in the yard / Water bucket / Jukbyeon Port / Northbound / About black plastic bags / Pink discharge / Station attendant / Calculation / About the eye booger window / Far away

Part 4 The birch trees pointed far north

Bukhansan / Bukdang / Flower Seeds and I / Byeolseo (別墅) / About the White-crowned Crane Couple in Naeseongcheon / The Moving of the Mulgusul Tree / Unpo Gugokga (雲浦九曲歌) / The Back of the Neck - To Mr. Hwang Jae-hyung / Silent Rivers and Mountains - Reading Lee Dong-sun's 『Forced Migration Train』 / Northern Expedition / Frostfish / West of Hwaseong / Heartbreak / The Woman Baking Bread / The Almost Absent Old Man / Lingering Snow / Sanda-gyeong (山茶徑) / How to Save the World

Preface | Overlapping
Kim Min-jeong (poet)

I was picking out stones in a flower garden when a friend came.
I'm trying to raise the flower garden
The poet asked, "Is this the kind of person who does such useless things?"
That's what makes flowers taller
It's useless, I muttered to myself.
He told me to hurry up and pull out the cabbages before the frost comes.
_「Raising the flower garden by an inch」 section

Anyone who has read even one of Ahn Do-hyun's poems will easily be able to connect the expression "extraordinary in the ordinary" with his poetry.
The title of the poetry collection, “There are things in the world that are uselessly dazzling,” is also a sentence that encapsulates his poetic world and can be read as an extension of it.
His free-spirited display of the extraordinary in the ordinary and the nobility in the vulgar is all the more striking because it focuses not on the worthlessness of "uselessness," but on the beauty and admiration of that very purposelessness.
“There is almost nothing in this world that cannot become poetry.
As can be seen from his words such as “(…) there is much meaning even in meaningless things” (from “Interview”), in his world there is nothing that “cannot become poetry,” so it seems to offer comfort that even our lives, which may seem insignificant, can be as beautiful as poetry, and that you and I can each exist in our own unique ways.

You said it was a useless station
Remembering useless things is also useless.
Only those who know how to remember are in pain
For that guy, the night will be as long as a railroad track.
_「Gopyeong Station」 section

The four parts of 『There Are Things in the World That Are Uselessly Dazzling』 are harmoniously arranged, mainly featuring the simple life scenes encountered in one's hometown, the mother and the north that one cannot meet but can draw, the seasons that greet each other as if it were the first time, and moments of agony that cross between the roles of citizen and poet.
Part 1, 'Questions You Can Keep Asking', contains the days when I think of my mother with restrained emotions and the well-being of nature, where flowers bloom and snow falls despite that.
“Predicting the concentration of sudden separation and oblivion” (“Sand Grave”), “writing a line on a blank sheet of paper” (“Pity”), “for thin and fragile things” (“Pause”), and then “while worrying uselessly, I also realize that the most useless thing is the most precious thing” (“White-necked Plover”). These are moments of clear sadness.
Part 2, 'Making Flowers Taller, That', continues with poems about life in his hometown of Yecheon, such as raising chickens, pulling out weeds, and going to the market to buy turnip seeds.
“Pulling weeds is a thousand times, ten thousand times more sacred than underlining in a book, so I’m looking around to see if I can find a bucket to scoop up this weed” (“The Weeder”), but poetry is lurking here too, so he can’t stop himself from “hurriedly writing down a few lines on paper with a ballpoint pen, worried that his junior, who is good at writing poetry, would write a story about being stung by a bee first, or that he would announce it first” (“The Story of Being Stung by a Bee”).

Standing with a handful of grass
Should I take it to the manure pile?
Should I collect them and throw them in the chicken coop?
I hesitated for a moment

There are things in the world that are uselessly dazzling.

I lived my life trying desperately to hide it.
With fingers without nails
I played the guitar and ate dinner
_「Fingernails」part

In Part 3, 'Winter is Long and the Flock of Whoopers is Not Simple', we go on a time travel to a place we can no longer go.
In the poet's eyes, the more something disappears, the more vivid it becomes, and so the flowers, autumn leaves, and night snow remain the same as they were then, going back and forth between 'questions and asking,' he writes, "On the beach of dreams, stretching out my beautiful, shriveled hands / Long as snowflakes" ("Jukbyeon Port").
“The clear and true sentence” (“Station Officer”) in “a day that is vain and strong” (“Night Eyes”) will also take us into the landscape he draws.
Part 4, 'The Birch Trees Pointed to the Far North', is filled with simple poems that could truly be called the second coming of Baek Seok, and his true colors as a poet and citizen are engraved on it.
Especially in the last poem, “How to Save the World,” his voice is filled with a deep regret as he says, “While I was struggling to figure out how to save the world/ the world collapsed helplessly,” and “I wore the least amount of myself possible/ to try to fit into the world/ I just walked and occasionally rode the subway.”
The poet says, “I spent my whole life babbling on words as dull as a magpie’s beak, which could not even land on my ear, let alone enter my eardrum” (“Stationary”), but “there were days when I was sad because we thought of each other” (“Frostfish”), but he manages to add, “I was truly happy while I showed you my heart and you showed me yours” (“Desolate Rivers and Mountains”), which is heart-wrenching.


In my humble family
There is no uncle who defected to North Korea to save his ideology.
There is no grandfather who takes a concubine to seek love.
How to write good poetry
I thought about it for a long time
I never once thought of writing bad poetry.
A poem with no meaning
I haven't tried it
Regret is as strong as a blizzard
_"How to Save the World" section

“Putting aside intentions if possible, and putting aside the desire to jump to conclusions,” I simply “held on to poetry” for the past five years. In this conversion, I “felt like I could face the color and moisture of each word much more freely than before” (from “Interview”), I encountered the fingerprints of life, 71 poems that are more powerful because they are written by someone who lives, plays, and sees poetry.
The realm where anything written becomes poetry is found in 『There are things in the world that are uselessly dazzling.』
“Just by calling each other’s names/ The saliva of love gathers under our tongues” (“Barefoot”), “Do you like it? There are many questions in the world that are good to keep asking” (“Barefoot”), and because the world is still full of useless and dazzling things, he writes poetry and we read his poetry.

A Mini-Interview with Poet Ahn Do-hyun

1.
The number 12 is a sacred and meaningful number, regardless of time or place.
Could you tell us your thoughts on the publication of this twelfth poetry collection?

→ I published my first poetry collection when I was 25, so I've published 12 poetry collections over 40 years.
I also feel a little guilty that I may have committed too many unnecessary crimes.
While writing the poems in this collection, I actually felt a bit excited.
The idea was not to force language into a certain standard, but to follow what language dictates.
If possible, I put aside my intentions and tried to hold onto poetry, even letting go of the temptation to jump to conclusions. Sometimes, the poems I wrote became a source of comfort to me.
While I was writing the poems included here, I packed my bags and moved back from Jeonju to my hometown of Yecheon, Gyeongbuk. In the meantime, the pandemic passed, my mother passed away, I had my first long hospital stay, and I quit the school I had been working at for so long.
There were often times when I would just sit around all day doing nothing or making no promises, and then poetry would come to me little by little.

2.
My first impression while reading and creating this poetry collection was that it was a state where no matter how or what I write, it becomes poetry.
This feeling of living poetry and arguing with poetry.
Where does this freedom of expression come from?

→ After living in a hollow nest called an apartment for most of my life, I returned to my hometown five years ago and started living on the ground.
As the yard, the garden, the pond, and the stone wall became part of my daily life, I began to see things I hadn't seen before and hear sounds I hadn't heard before.
Every morning when I open the window, the sound of birds pours in, and I often think about wrapping up these sounds in a bundle and sending them to someone.
Since the 1980s, I have been thinking about the social role of poetry for quite some time, and have lived with a sense of duty as a poet.
I feel that weight less now, and I feel like I can face the color and moisture of each word much more freely than before.
I'm not trying to pretend to be sane.
In the future, I want to better serve the language that comes to me than I do the poetry itself, and I want to let that language follow its course without interfering with it.

3.
The title, ‘There are things in the world that are uselessly dazzling,’ can also be read as a sentence that encapsulates the author’s poetic world.
The fingerprints of a life where both vulgarity and nobility coexist are found throughout the Psalms.
I'm curious about the moment you sense that it will become a poem and the process that unfolds thereafter.

→ It used to be difficult to move from the first line of a poem to the second line.
It was because of my greed to get too involved in poetry.
A poet who writes poetry is truly insignificant compared to his language.
I think that when a poet gets ahead of his words, the result is usually a failure.
A poet must believe in the dazzling productivity that words can create.
I think Professor Kim Hyun's words that literature is unusable and that literature does not oppress people because of its unusable nature are still valid.
If you look around, there is almost nothing in this world that cannot be made into poetry.
The wicked desire to distinguish between poetry and non-poetry, meaning and meaninglessness, is similar to the obsession with utility in capitalist society.
There is much meaning in meaningless things.
I would say that this collection of poems has just begun to tell that story.


4.
Which of the included poems resonates with you most? I'd also like to hear why.

→ None.

5.
Please tell us one of your unique 'poetry reading' tips.

→ When I read other people's poetry, I don't think about the poet, and I don't try to find the hidden message in the poem.
Let's just look at how the language of that poem differs from other poems.
I try to read as much as possible, without reading it in a meticulous and analytical manner.
I seek out and read more poems by poets younger than me.

Poet's words

Thinking about making a flower garden
I went out to get flowers and stones.
Spring has passed.

Still, the blood feud with Eunyu,
How fortunate that is.

November 2025
Ahn Do-hyun