Poet's words

Part 1: The Deep Sea is Another Universe

Deep Sea Love/ Heart Poem/ I am writing to you about the fact that the branches of a tree all grow in different directions but in the end the tree faces upwards, and the sight of hundreds of birds sitting on the tree suddenly flying up for no reason, and the sadness that not a single leaf is left on the tree now, and the thick contrails and the flock of birds flying along the contrails, and the thought that all of this is actually traces intentionally left by an invisible angel/ Island Story/ Rainmaker/ The Sky Called Sea/ The Sky Called Sea/ Sea Poem/ Without going to the sea

Part 2: A Planet for Two

Love in the Universe / Again, Love in the Universe / Black Hole / If There Is Light in Our Hearts / Ten Hearts / Anti-gravity / Colors from Space / Futuristic / Poetry of the Heart / Simulation / Simulation / Simulation / Space Odyssey / Warp / Interstellar Flight / Artificial Star / Expansion and Contraction

There was no such thing as a 3rd party response

Religious poetry/religious poetry/religious movies/zombie movies/the god of mechanical zombies/there was a god of mechanical poodles/religious poetry/unbelief/poem of the heart/reincarnation/DIY

Part 4 Sad, Depressed, Anxious, Despairing, Loving

Kokoro/ Kokoro/ Kokoro/ Kokoro/ Kokoro/ Kokoro/ Kokoro

Part 5: What was buried in the snow

*/ */ */ */ *

Part 6 With just one person

A hundred-line poem written together

Commentary | Poetic Proof of the Heart _Jo Dae-han (Literary Critic)

The first space that Shin Jin-yong, who is absorbed in “a firm belief in and constant exploration of the invisible, unknown existence” (literary critic Jo Dae-han, commentary), focuses on is the deep sea.
Part 1, 'The Deep Sea is Another Universe', heads towards the vast underwater world that humans have not yet discovered.
At the bottom of the sea, where he had reached, the speaker said, “Without light.
We discover “over a hundred million hearts, crushed a thousand times” (“Love in the Deep Sea”) that have stopped cold.
Like deep-sea creatures that survive by enduring water pressure, hearts are left “at the bottom of a trench” (“Mind Poem”) or “in the dark and slow sky below” (“Sky Called the Sea”), crushed by something.
The heart at this time is so dense and heavy that it can sink an “angel” into the water, but the angel who cannot let go of his heart and eventually rots is emphasized as an angel who is destined to “love” (“Island Story”), unlike others. Therefore, “love” seems to be one of the important elements that holds onto the heart.
Then, after witnessing “you” dying on the beach every day, he decides to “call it love” (“Without Going to the Sea”), and for the poetic speaker, love becomes an attitude of accepting and embracing death.

In the second part, 'A Planet for Two', space is treated as a space similar to the deep sea.
In the poem "Love of the Universe," which is the title of the collection and opens the second part, the speaker is writing a letter to someone who "is not yet alive, but will be."
According to him, planets are agglomerations of “minds drawn together by a strong gravitational force.”
Carrying the burden of an unstable planet's future, destined to "grow old" and perhaps even "disappear" in a universe that repeats expansion and contraction, the speaker persistently explores the "mind," the constituent material that makes up the planet.
Then he faces a problem that he cannot solve for the time being.

Decades ago, you asked:
If the mind generates gravity.
If one mind attracts another mind and eventually they become one.
If the minds that are united as one generate a stronger gravity.

If all of this is an undeniable fact.

Why are our hearts not one?
_「Again, Love of the Universe」 section

What is noteworthy here is that, according to the footnote supplementing the main text, the sender of the letter is the Swiss astronomer “Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974).”
Considering that Zwicky was the first to detect an unknown substance that is invisible to the eye but clearly exists in the universe and named it “dark matter” in 1933, and that the same year is written in the above poem (letter), it is possible to infer that there is an interfering substance in the universe that “prevents minds from uniting and becoming one mind.”
As fiction and reality exquisitely intersect, 'mind' gradually becomes a name referring to a specific object in reality.
For example, “black hole” is the mind that “cannot withstand its own gravity/and sinks inward” (“Black Hole”), and the name of the meteorite that fell “three hundred thousand years ago, in the Chicxulub region of the Yucatan Peninsula” (“If There Is Light in Our Hearts”) is “mind.”
The “phenomenon of mind entanglement” (from “Mind Poetry”), in which “no matter how far apart they are, they influence each other”, brings to mind the theory of “quantum entanglement.”


In addition, the poet uses footnotes to link numerous scholars and academics to the poem, giving it a fictional context unrelated to actual facts.
This is an attempt to create a new world of poetry that shares the space and time outside the poetry collection like a parallel universe, and is an essential device that increases the overall plausibility of the poetry collection.
Footnotes are typically used to supplement content that is not fully covered in the main text or to explain technical terms, but in this collection, they serve to provide a connection to reality within the poems, allowing for multi-layered interpretations.

This clever and sophisticated imagination calls out to ‘God’ in the third part, ‘There was no such thing as a response.’
In this strange coexistence of science and non-science, God is a professor who leads a “poetry class” (“Religious Poetry”), a protagonist in a film (“Religious Film”), an actor who plays a zombie (“Zombie Film”), and a “mechanical zombie” who constantly transforms into a mechanized “mechanical zombie” (“The God of Mechanical Zombies”).
In “There Was a God of Mechanical Poodles,” “Poem of Faith,” and “Disbelief,” which the poet himself stated were part of a series of poems, he is also hinted at as a companion dog who has passed away.

On the way back from sending off what was a god, my wife and I walked separately. My wife walked a little ahead of me.

I don't know how to live without God
My wife looked back at me and said

It would be better if you served another god.
I looked back and answered, seeing no one there.

That day, we both fell asleep quickly. I thought I would never be able to fall asleep, but that wasn't the case.
_The "Disbelief" section

The three psalms, which can be read differently depending on the reader's beliefs, lead us to consider "how living with the belief in such a virtual being helps us understand each other's hearts" (commentary).

In Part 4, 'Sad, Depressed, Despairing, and Loving', a fictional character named 'Kokoro' also appears.
In the four parts of the eponymous poem "Kokoro," the protagonist, Kokoro, is depicted as a "human hunter," a "programmed data personality," or a "non-personality" equipped with a "polymer weapon hybrid heart."
The persistent exploration of the mind continues amidst the simultaneous overlapping of a dystopia where humans are domesticated as a type of animal, a fantasy city where all emotions are ruined and “melancholy flies like dust,” and a world where humans who have succeeded in the “human revolution” once again dominate non-humans.
This world is a place where “deep and intense sadness” is administered like a drug, and “extremely painful hearts” pour down like a torrential downpour.
Humans have only “sad, depressed, anxious, and desperate feelings,” and “love, separation, and death” have “powers strong enough to blow up an entire city.”
“The lifespan of a loving heart” is absurdly short compared to other hearts, but it seems to be the only elixir that can save humans in the city of despair.


Kokoro looked at the humans with a lonely gaze that was cold and lonely.
It was peaceful, without sadness, depression, anxiety, despair, or anything else.
How can humans be like this?
Kokoro opened her body and took out her old love.
It was a device to operate humans.
Kokoro manipulated love.
The human's pupils opened and darkness poured into the human.
Kokoro manipulated love once again.
Humans have begun to operate.
The flames burst out in a frenzy.
_「Kokoro」 part

“White smoke condenses and falls like snow” from a human burning with love, and that snow is embodied in special characters piled up gently in Part 5, “What Was Buried in the Snow.”
Here too, ‘heart’ still appears as an important poetic word.
“Snowflakes are repeated in the mind” and are formed based on the “nucleus of the mind.”
However, “since all hearts are different, snowflakes of the same shape cannot be repeated” (「*」), and they fall and pile up in various forms according to the five shapes that appear throughout the psalms (*, *, *, *, *).


*************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
_"*" part time job

As the speaker wanders through the snowy field, he continues to “ask” (「*」) something, which can be read as an act of actually digging out snow, but also as a way of asking a question to someone standing in the snow.
The identity of “what was buried in the snow” (「*」) is a record “written on paper until I could write no more” (「*」), and it is also the “love” (「*」) that the two people shared.
The speaker in the poem seems to be trying to preserve the objects he wants to protect forever but cannot by burying them in the snow, and like the snow that continues to fall in the poetry collection, this act is also 'repeated'.
This pledge to continue “until my heart gives out” (「*」) is connected to the “100-line poem written together” in Part 6, “With just one person.”
This poem, consisting of a hundred lines written alternately by a lover, is something that “could end in one piece,” but at the same time “could not end even if it were to become a hundred pieces.”
In this way, the poet is obsessed with pursuing something that will remain unchanging for a long time in a changing world.


The only force that can illuminate the darkness is light, and “light is the only constant in this universe” (“If There Is Light in Our Hearts”).
The light that the speaker of Part 1 had been searching for on the seabed was “the light of the heart” (“Sea Poem”).
Shin Jin-yong's poetic world, which extends infinitely into the deep sea, space, the future, and the virtual world, is thus connected by the poetic word 'heart.'
This ending, which begins with “the power of endless expansion” and ends with “the power of sinking deeper into the center,” makes us reflect on ourselves, who “have been relatively negligent in exploring our own inner selves” (commentary).


To understand this strange and beautiful world, to face the ridiculous and sad reality show (“Warp”) where “hundreds of millions of participants live together,” Shin Jin-yong designs his own universe and looks down on this world with compassionate eyes as a creator.
The conclusion we can draw from his experimental world, completed through countless scientific investigations and numerous simulations, is the clear fact that the only unchanging value among human beings is the mind.
Based on that belief, the poet retrieves the familiar emotion of love from the hearts of 'you' and 'me' who live sharing an extremely small part of the vast universe and redefines it as 'us'.
With delicate eyes, as if naming a single star shining in the distant sky.

Let us recall Fritz Zwicky's argument for invisible matter.
When he published his paper, his claim only briefly caught people's attention, but soon disappeared as one of many hypotheses.
It was a later scientist named Vera Rubin who revived the debate by finding new evidence to support his claims.
(……) The unknown substance, which was called ‘Missing Mass’ for a while, has emerged as a major interest in modern astronomy under the clear name of ‘Dark Matter’, and is now openly considered to be a substance that makes up a significant portion of the universe.
Thanks to our unwavering belief in the invisible, unknown, and persistent quest for knowledge, and our tenacious connection to the past, our world has been reshaped.

And here is a poet who has created his own fascinating world based on his belief in the intangible mind.
For the letter containing his message to reach us in its entirety, it will have to cross the vast expanses of space and time, and in the process, perhaps many rare records will be swept away by the waves of oblivion and erased. However, if we dig up and dig up our buried hearts, if we live with our own beliefs, “like creatures that shine on their own because there is no light” (“Love in the Deep Sea”), if we repeat the never-ending story “with you, who believes that even things that seem impossible can happen someday” (“Simulation”), our planet, which is entangled with a world of unfamiliar landscapes, may also gradually wobble beautifully in line with it.
_Jo-han, in the commentary

A Mini-Interview with Poet Shin Jin-yong

1.
This is the first poetry collection published since his debut.
I think there must have been many stories that you haven't been able to tell or that you wanted to tell.
I'm curious about your thoughts on compiling this poetry collection.


I've come this far by picking out the 'stories I can tell' from the 'stories I want to tell'.
As I've been writing poetry over the past few years, I've felt like those two things are increasingly coming together, and it's been a fun, but also somewhat sad, experience.
In the end, I feel like I was left with only one story that I wanted to tell/could tell, and that I just extended that one story a little.

2.
The themes are clearly divided by department.
Among the diverse worldviews that appear, from the deep sea to space and the future, if there is a poetic word that penetrates the center of them all, it seems to be 'heart.'
Ultimately, what kind of mind did you want to write about?

At first, I wanted to write about 'all hearts', but as I wrote, I was only able to write about 'certain hearts', and in the end, what remained was not a specific heart, but 'attitude toward the heart'.
Whether it's a sad heart, a happy heart, or a loving heart, I think what's important is the attitude of continuing to strive and make an effort to keep that heart, which is never taken for granted.

3.
The title, “Written on a Planet That Will Disappear,” seems to imply that the land we live on may not be eternal.
Please tell us how you came to choose it as the title.

This is a sentence written while thinking about 'how we should disappear on a planet that is disappearing, and how we should disappear even faster than that planet.'
As I kept thinking about disappearing, I came to the decision that I 'should' stay here with you, and that's why I chose 'Disappear (written from the planet)' as the title, which is the beginning of that decision.

4.
The character 'Kokoro' appears in all seven poems that make up Part 4, and in Part 5, snowflakes piled up are depicted using special characters.
The unique composition is impressive.
Is there a specific emotion you wanted readers who have read parts 1-3 to feel as they reach the latter half?

I was greatly influenced by comics and games since I was young, and I wanted to create a science fiction worldview.
So, in Part 4, the story of countless 'Kokoro (=hearts)' repeating countless 'hearts' is told through a more specific virtual world, different from the deep sea or space mentioned above.
So, I hope that from Part 1 to Part 4, you will feel like you are traveling through different stories through different themes (as if you are traveling to different stars).
Part 5 is a more convergent version of the previous stories.* As I wrote in the poem, the eyes will repeat and the heart will also repeat, so I would like to tell you that the end of this collection of poems is not the end of all stories.

5.
I wonder if there are any poems in the collection that you hope will remain in the hearts of readers for a long time.
If there's anything else you'd like to say, please let me know.

"There was a god of mechanical poodles."
When I write poetry, I try to avoid overly personal elements, but for this poem, I wrote it from the beginning with my dog ​​in mind.
My dog ​​is old and has many aches and pains, so I can't help but always think about parting ways. This poem was written while I was worrying about, 'How will I live if he dies?'
I know that a poem written with affection doesn't necessarily mean it's good poetry, but I can't help but love this poem as much as I love my dog.

Even if you read this collection of poems to the end, you will not be able to fully understand my feelings as I wrote it, and similarly, I will not be able to know your feelings as you read this collection of poems.
Still, I hope that while reading the poem, you will feel, even if only for a moment, the welcome illusion that we have connected.

Poet's words

The most joyful thing about this season was sharing wild strawberries with you.

Was it a happy enough thing?

Joy doesn't matter.
What's always lacking is sadness.

September 2025
Shin Jin-yong