Poet's words

Part 1
desert
In some cases
Old prayer
Full moon
Spring Day
morning
Spring is coming
Snow falling in March
Free but lonely
A morning alone
Spring Letter
Spring Day 2
Living alone
alms bowl
moonlit night
large flower
candlelight
motion sickness
Spring day arrival
Really slow slow
Pretend not to know

Part 2
Water lotus
thunder
summer sleep
Viscounty
heavy snow
mountain village
Thinking of noodles
alchemy
Empire of the Senses
birthday
artist
Text message
Still a long way to go
There's more outside
So many facts, so many questions
Sansevieria
Talk to your waist
You are my destiny
Koala thoughts
hunting

Part 3
Love is leaving
Hands seek hands
Hand's White Paper
If you haven't held hands yet
A very strange yet familiar story
A Very Strange, Familiar Story 2
The end of the earth is the beginning of the earth
Cherry Blossom Tunnel
The Story of the Orchid
citizen
The full moon has risen!
solar system
A hat worn by feet
A Thousand Plateaus
house
rice
white book
White Paper 2
The house is not at home
Who doesn't know this person?
The price of a cow should be around this much
shooting star

Part 4
This is the front right now
floor
gold rope
It's raining
Falling flowers
I planted a tree in the desert
Yes, thoughts are energy.
Urban Farming Project
Capitalism as I know it
If you are devout
Orange Horror
The sea every day
Sucheojakju (隨處作主)
pilgrimage
earthling
I am the border
A Very Strange, Familiar Story 3
Diaspora
Diaspora again
red ballpoint pen
Have a nice day
We are island people

Commentary | Why This Place is Front and Center
Shin Hyeong-cheol (literary critic)

“Just closing your eyes is like praying.”
―Proverb-oriented psalms written as if praying, reciting an incantation, or conveying an oracle.


If you keep adding truth to truth, it becomes zero.
It only becomes lighter, but translation and summarization become impossible.
His poetry is like that.

Literary critic Kim Jong-cheol once said that if a poet is someone who remembers other people's work as his own, then poet Lee Moon-jae is a 'natural' poet.
Because poet Lee Moon-jae empties himself through constant self-focus and looks at things and the world with an empty mind, the simple truth that “everything is connected” becomes even more clearly evident to him.
Meanwhile, literary critic Do Jeong-il's theory of poets is that a poet is someone who cannot take his eyes off all of nature's ways of existence, and therefore, for poets, there is no such thing as 'poetry of the ecosystem.'
“Because the groans of nature, the painful groans of the lowest things in the world, ring in the ears of poets day and night” (The Poet Cannot Go to the Forest), a poet can be a poet.
Although these theories on poets by two veteran critics are not recent, they still provide useful clues for understanding the poetic world of Lee Moon-jae.
The poet's declaration in "The Wilderness of the Heart" that "just as all true poets are profound ecologists, all true poets are beings who worry about the future" is also in the same context.

Poet Lee Moon-jae's fifth poetry collection, "Now Here is the Front Line," released 10 years after "Imperial Hotel," has been published by Munhakdongne.
The topic of ‘here and now’ is not an unfamiliar topic to readers who have read the poet’s poetry.
Since publishing his poems in the 4th volume of 『Poetry Movement』 in 1982, or perhaps even earlier, the poet may have been constantly thinking about the topic of the here and now.
And at the same time, it would have been a mind that was 'worried about the future'.
The poet has been discovering or inventing things here and now: sledding on the equator (“Jamaican bobsled”), the information about longing in our genes, “writing as idleness,” “agriculture as metaphor,” “anthropocentrism,” “the end of the century,” and “always-connected e-humans.”
If 10 years ago, the poet might have thought that this place was a dystopia or a brave new world, and thus talked about being unplugged and disconnected from the power source, he now seems to have reached a new realization: “I was at the forefront here and now.”

Everyone in heaven and earth was at the forefront.
The awareness of being at the forefront must have come from emotion, not knowledge or theory.
As my respected friend said, what we need now is not a worldview but a sense of the world.
Restoring the sensibility to fully perceive the world and myself is an urgent task.
―Excerpt from “The Poet’s Words”

"Now Here is the Front Line," which contains 85 poems, is divided into four parts.
Literary critic Shin Hyeong-cheol, who wrote the commentary for the poetry collection, reads 『Now Here is the Front』 by capturing the keywords of each part as 'spring', 'middle age', 'love/death', and 'sociology of time and space'.
And next to this collection of poems he wrote T. 90 years ago.
Bring out S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" and place them side by side.

Just like "The Waste Land," this collection of poems also began with the scenery of a spring day (Part 1), and the "I" of this collection began to look back on his own person after hearing the sound of thunder that also resonated in the 5th verse of "The Waste Land" ("What the Thunder Told Me") ("Thunder"), and so, like the fisherman king of "The Waste Land" who fished in the gloomy canals of London, he climbed to the top of the Viscounty to seek his own rebirth (Part 2), and like many of the main characters of "The Waste Land," he thought deeply about love and death in our time (Part 3), and then descended to a more concrete world of life to find an alternative imagination like this (Part 4).
If that's the case, wouldn't it be better if this collection of poems ended at that miraculous moment when the desert turned into a grassland, like "The Wasteland," which ends with rain falling in the desert?
―From the commentary, “Why is this place at the forefront now?”

For the poet Eliot a century ago, this was post-World War I European society.
Shin Hyeong-cheol reads the gap between the two texts together, saying that the poet of “Wasteland” must have been more immersed in the thought that “here and now is the end,” but the current poet Lee Moon-jae must have reached the realization that “here and now is the beginning” “with the most earnest earnest longing.”

On the other hand, this gap may also be a history of the mind and a kind of enlightenment that poet Lee Moon-jae has experienced over the past ten years.
As the poet confessed in “The Poet’s Words,” “My thoughts have changed little by little since my fourth poetry collection.”

A tree is a beginning at the end.
Always start at the end.
From the root to the top of the branches
From new shoots to flowers and fruits
For every tree, the end is the beginning.

This is the end now.
Trees, earth, water, wind, and sunlight
Each one is at the very end, so they are at the front.
Memories, longing, loneliness, despair, tears, anger
Dreams, hopes, empathy, compassion, solidarity, and love
Historical Era Civilization Evolution Earth Universe
This is the front right now.

Here I am now, facing the front.
―Full text of "Right Here, Right Now"

In the phrase “now here is the very end,” “now” means the end in time, and “here” means the cliff in space.
So is the poet trying to tell us that we are standing on the edge of a cliff and that the end is imminent?
The confession that “my thoughts have changed little by little since my fourth poetry collection” came before was probably to say that I read the “very end,” which could be a cliff or an end, as the “very beginning,” and thus dialectically and avant-garde.
Isn’t it possible that the realization that “land’s end” is also “the end of the sea,” “the end of the water,” “the very beginning of the land,” and “the beginning of the land” could be achieved together?

Ten years ago, the poet's friend, Ko Jong-seok, said in the preface to "Imperial Hotel" that "walking is the fertilizer of Lee Moon-jae's life." Has the poet been walking "alone, on two feet, like leaving fingerprints" for the past ten years, to the ends of the earth?
And perhaps, after facing the sea for a long time at the end of the land, he burst into tears, his whole body brightening, and then, “finally turning back at the end of the land,” he realized anew “the very beginning of the land.” (“The End of the Land is the Beginning of the Land”). Perhaps, the realization that “the bottom of the land” is in fact “the bottom of the sky,” “the head of the land,” “the crown of the land” that “always/ stands upright” also came along like that. (“The Bottom”)

The moment we read the phrase, “Even if I just close my eyes quietly/ I am praying,” our minds become momentarily dazed and then quickly brighten. This is probably because the poet’s walks and the history of his heart are fully conveyed to the reader.
“Even if we just wrap our left hand around our right hand,” “even if we just stop walking when the sunset sets,” “even if we just connect the islands with our eyes/even if we just look at the dark part of the waning moon/we are praying,” we encounter something that has been familiar to us in a slightly unfamiliar way before the poet’s beautiful, kind, and devout guidance.
Following the commentator's previous experience, rather than hitting our knees and saying that we have learned something we didn't know before after reading the poet's poetry, we might be a little more humble and say that we no longer know something we once knew.

The awareness that “I am at the forefront here and now” “must not be knowledge or theory, but rather something that comes from emotion.” Therefore, the poet sets “the recovery of the emotion that allows me to fully perceive the world and myself” as an urgent task.
And finally, the poet conveys a wish that is like a prayer, like an incantation.
“I hope that these somewhat unfamiliar yet familiar stories, like old prayers, gathered together like this, will join hands with those who imagine other people, other worlds.” (From “The Poet’s Note”) (*)


● Poet's words

It's been 10 years since we tied the knot.
After my fourth poetry collection, my thoughts have changed little by little.
Instead of asking what poetry is, I asked what poetry should be.
Instead of asking what poetry can do, I used to ask what more poetry can do.
I also tried changing the poem to "me" or "you."
What should I be?
What more can we do?

So now I am at the front.
Everyone in heaven and earth was at the forefront.
The awareness of being at the forefront must have come from emotion, not knowledge or theory.
As my respected friend said, what we need now is not a worldview but a sense of the world.
Restoring the sensibility to fully perceive the world and myself is an urgent task.
We are countless points of view before we are a single point of view.

As worldviews and worldly perceptions come together, a new worldview that we long for will emerge.
The simple truth that everything is interconnected will take on a startling new meaning.
I hope that these somewhat unfamiliar yet familiar stories, like old prayers, gathered together like this, will join hands with people who imagine different lives and different worlds.

Spring 2014
Lee Moon-jae