Poet's words

Part 1: When you smile, my world becomes a comfort

Politely and alone/ It's my brother's water/ Practice/ Our emptiness is apples/ Street trees/ Stones/ Diverse sadness lush/ While sadness ripens, shall we share and forget/ Worries/ By ourselves/ We lived exchanging time for love, and who was first? The one who thought it was a waste to exchange it for love/ Balance/ Love is forgotten, but muscles remain/ Cool sadness/ Soyang River Soro/ We decided not to ask others for our love/ I finally met you, who said there was no time, but you seemed to hate me, and after we broke up, when my heart felt like it was filled with a sunset

Part 2 I tied it loosely so I wouldn't cry if I lost it

For happiness / The limits of happiness / Hope / The attitude of happiness / Unhappiness without mistake / The trap of happiness / Why should we throw away happiness / Softly / Happy vegetables / Seasonal happiness / Quiet passion / Happiness 1 / The trend of happiness / Happiness 2 / Happiness 3 / Spare time / The last happiness / The real last happiness

Part 3: The opportunity to be kind hasn't come yet.

Thirty/ Original Sin/ I left the burdock behind/ Case/ Pull/ In a world where machines pray/ Motive/ Sticker/ Carelessness/ Infection/ Collection/ Tight/ Welcome/ Virtual Water/ If you plant rice, there's only one day left to eat/ People make everything they can imagine. Is it because they only imagine what they can make? Then why/ Online Nirvana/ Perfection is God's work, so I decided not to even come close to perfection/ Tea tastes much better when the chef gives up his hands/ Palm

Commentary | The Man Who Turns Sorrow into Miracles
So Yoo-jeong (literary critic)

If you go down to the bottom
When you know your own bottom

I thought I could stand up and get out

I know my floor, I know my limits
I kicked it out and there was a different floor.

When living seems like renewing sadness

On a spring day when all the flower petals have fallen
What fell did not come back and stick again.

(…)

To keep not missing, to keep not letting go
All my loves have torn gills
_「Politely Lonely」 section

The first poem that opens the collection and which permeates the atmosphere of the entire collection, “Politely Lonely,” features a speaker who, on a “spring day when all the petals have fallen,” tries to “keep on not letting go” of love, only to realize that his love has “all its gills torn.”
The speaker's appearance may seem tragic in one way, but on the other hand, he seems not to be afraid of love because he knows that "loneliness" is not only an emotion that isolates the person left alone, but also makes "two" people "sad" for their own "own" reasons.
Therefore, this poem can be said to show not the tragedy of love's failure, but the pure heart of the speaker who does not stop loving even though he knows that winning "a human heart" is "the most difficult thing" ("Love is forgotten, but muscles remain").

Part 1, 'When you smile, my world becomes comforted', is filled with poems that unfold various aspects of love through a familiar language in which the poetic speaker 'I' with such feelings speaks to the poetic object 'you'.
The speaker, who repeats, “If you love until you don’t love anymore/ there is nothing you can’t love” (“Senior”), records in detail the emotions that come from love.
It unfolds the ever-changing emotions surrounding love, such as the joy of love (“I was glad I was born”, “Brother, you’re water”), the sadness of love (“I thought everything that sparkled was love”, “The sadness of diversity is silent”), the foolishness of love (“Why can’t I be loved?”, “Love is forgotten, but muscles remain”), and the emptiness of love (“Can’t we live just tasting love and life?”, “Our emptiness is a persimmon”).
Yoo Su-yeon's poetry can be said to be a beautiful introduction to the study of love, tracing the origin of love, which "flows away first" and "the beginning of the flow cannot be found."

While I write, you become my most beautiful prayer, and suddenly, I hope that today's sadness can become another day's miracle. But the pillow is very wet. Did you cry a lot? No, oh, then you slept with wet hair. You, who used to tell me to dry off and sleep today, don't even come to my dreams. (...) Even though there's no one else, you often lie down next to me, and I continue to fall asleep holding a certain sentence like you. _Excerpt from "Practice"

If Part 1 mainly depicts the relationship between 'I' and 'you', Part 2, 'I Tie It Loosely So I Won't Cry Even If I Lose It', which can be called a 'happiness' series, explores the emotion of 'happiness' that sustains our lives with a deeper and broader perspective.
The poet paradoxically tries to find happiness in a life that can never be called entirely happy.
This may seem to be because the happiness the poet desires is not very great, but on the other hand, it can also be felt as an attitude of swearing a hushed will, saying, “The living must live” (“The Virtues”), “I must live myself” (“The Limits of Happiness”).
The speaker's voice, which says that living "to cry" means "choosing commotion to live" ("For Happiness"), sounds like "a determination to barely hold on to the will to live, and at the same time a desperate spell for one's own happiness," as literary critic So Yoo-jeong, who wrote the commentary, puts it.

It's getting dull
It's getting soft

Not all wounds

Because that's how life is
I'll try to forget while I'm alive

Even though the size is different
Even though the number is different

Because it is measured by weight
_「Seasonal Happiness」 section

So what does the poet define happiness? In a mini-interview with the editor, the poet answers that happiness is "not the search for an answer, but the question itself," and that it is "not something" but "not giving up on asking what it is."

This attitude of the poet seems to be connected to the poetic speakers of the third part, “It’s just that the opportunity to be good hasn’t come yet,” who have “pushed” the “answer sheet” called “life” (“Thirty”) and have reached an age where they can no longer be called young.
The poems included in Part 3 are overflowing with poetic enlightenment cultivated through the intense daily life.
Impressive works include “Original Sin,” which discovers the abyss of human guilt caused by misguided beliefs through the experience of mistakenly picking up a wallet after mistaking it for someone who dropped it, and “I Left a Buckwheat Leaf Behind,” which ponders how to use the limited time in life preciously while recalling the small mistake of leaving a buckwheat leaf behind at work.

The poet also tries to overcome the hopelessness of life, which is like a “vast ocean” with “no answer” (“Thirty”), and the resulting sadness, by relying on religion, symbolized by “the words of Buddha” (“Online Nirvana”).
However, the poet doubts salvation through an absolute God.
For a poet, life is nothing but an endless prayer of writing poetry.
"Love and Kindness Fall" is a collection of poems in which the poet consoles "all life" (from "Study") that has been "driven out of dreams" through poetry, thereby giving readers a strong will not to let go of life and love.

When I think about praying
You can pray as if you love

(…)

What darkness needs is not light,
It could be the same darkness
_Part "Happiness 1"

He didn't lose himself.
The reason he was able to not give up on love, sadness, people, and himself even after the hand that had been holding his hand disappeared was probably because he held both hands himself.
Those are very quiet praying hands.
_So Yoo-jeong, in the commentary

A mini-interview with poet Yoo Su-yeon

Q1.
"Love and Kindness Comes to an End" is the poet's second poetry collection.
I think it's a different feeling than when I published my first poetry collection.
Please give your greetings and thoughts to our readers.

My heart became a sinful mess because I was barely able to let go of love.
I'm glad I didn't have to pick up a pen to write this.
How have you been? I've been doing well.
I hope that one day this poetry collection will resemble the love you laid down.
Let's weigh together the weight of our love, each with its own distinct form, purpose, and scent. Let's gently shift our zero point to the leaning side and hang side by side.

Q2.
“Respectfully Lonely,” which opens the book, is a poem that runs through this collection.
The emotions of loneliness, love, separation, and loss are expressed in very delicate and careful language.
I wonder what was in your mind when you wrote this poem.

I lived feeling like “living is renewing sadness.”
It's been ten years since I got my driver's license.
It's been a while since I received a call to renew my license, but I still haven't done it.
It must have felt like a very cumbersome and complicated process.
Even though I know it's not that difficult, I still don't do it.
I think this poem contains that kind of feeling.
It is time to forget the sorrow of ten years and now to experience a new sorrow.
But how can we experience new sorrow?
The face on my old ID is no longer mine, but sometimes I show it to myself as if it were me now.
That's okay though.
No one calls me a different person from the me of the past and the me of the present.
I was the only one who noticed the sadness at that time.

Q3.
Part 2 can be said to be a series of poems on 'happiness'.
The titles are unique, such as “For Happiness,” “The Limits of Happiness,” “Unhappiness Without Mistakes,” and “Seasonal Happiness,” and as you read the poems, you begin to wonder what happiness is.
How did you come to write these poems?

It was a journey to find happiness.
These are poems that lead to the question, 'What is happiness?'
But even though the poems gradually accumulated into a volume, the answer did not come out.
Then I found out.
Ah, this isn't about finding an answer, it's about asking the question itself.
It's not about what happiness is, but about never giving up on asking what it is.
When I thought about it that way, everything that bloomed and withered in my heart seemed like happiness.
No one can hold summer or fall.
Everyone has different standards for what is the first snow and what is the beginning of the season.
Phenomena arise diligently as phenomena, and we simply bloom and fade within them.
This poetry collection is the same.
They are just things that have been done.

Q4.
If there is a poem in this collection that you particularly cherish, please tell us which one it is and why.

I'm thinking of saving "Shall we share and forget while the sadness ripens" a little.
I remember neglecting this poem.
I was rereading this poem after revising its title during the final proofreading, and I thought, "Was there a sentence like this?"
It's also a poem full of things I didn't notice until someone told me.
I looked back and realized that I had put these feelings into what I wrote.
The phrase, “It’s not that it’s hurting, it’s that it’s ripening/ In your face, which says that’s what people are like,” is completely different in the way I felt when I wrote it and in the way I felt when I read it later.
After writing this poem, I wonder if some of my memories were shared with someone and forgotten.
While we were sharing and forgetting, sadness, love, and loneliness ripened.
I like it when the poems I write become unfamiliar.
It's like I've barely forgotten how sad it was.
Even as I wrote this poem, I felt comforted by thinking, “That’s how it is, that’s how people are.”

Q5.
The words 'heart' and 'muscle' caught my eye.
The line, “Even remembering requires muscles/ It was hard to hold on to sad memories for a long time” (“Attitude of Happiness”) was impressive, and the sentence, “The mind is quite flexible” (“Why Should I Throw Away Happiness”) is also memorable.
Please give us your final greetings and tell us how you hope readers will enjoy this collection of poems.

Please miss it.
There will come a time when we will pick up what has fallen, and it will also tell us where it should return.
Winter will come soon, and then spring will come again, right? Even the trees drop their flowers to forget them.
Our flower path may be full of scars.
But the fertilizer that will grow us will be the love we drop.
So please don't think of failure in love as the end of love.
Thank you for reading.

Poet's words

You said poetry was difficult and incomprehensible, so I asked you to try to understand flowers. But I opened the poetry book and explained it to you for a long time. Because I wanted to understand the blush on your face as love.

I know that finally losing is happiness, but I won't bother explaining what caused us to lose, because we can't go pick up what we dropped back then.

I still don't know love and I'm not good

Fall 2024
Yoo Su-yeon