Part 1: A Circle Lives Within a Circle

Sponge Classroom
jungle gym
Catchball
Dalseong Park
reverse soccer match
A tadpole in worry, a butterfly in the clouds on a clear day
lug
Actually, I live with crocodiles
Butterfly drone
Good Wolf
The scary snail
Jump rope
Convex playground
Augmented Reality
flounder eyes
2nd grade class 7 teacher's name

Part 2: I Went to Meet the Fox

Fantasy Classroom
bicycle wheel
Fox rain
ramen
A plant called a chair
wall clock
puddle
juggling
inclination
I look into myself
sketchbook
Leaf Park
If food chooses us
Ant ghost
fine dust
frozen pizza

Part 3 The door is walking

Walking door
Pinocchio's dream
Becoming Friends with Bugs
Grass Playground
house bugs
Crumpled can
My heart, a window waiting for the birds that have flown away
Guinness Book of Records
tissue
plural
lollipop candy
running
development
onion

Part 4 I made a promise while wiping my beard

Earthquake evacuation drill
Kwon Ki-deok, Kungdeoreoreore
Line-symmetrical figures
Strange promise
Cuckoo's Shadow
Beard Showdown
elephant
On the flower bed
Scary school commute
goalkeeper gloves
pistol
Jenga
streetlights
Morning study time
Deep in my heart

Commentary | A Poem That Embraces, Soothes, and Gives Wings_Kim Je-gon
Poet's Words｜Here it is, always, even as time passes

“If it’s ramen, it can be anything!”
A collection of poems that encourage children's cheerful adventures.

"If I Were Ramen" is the first collection of poems by poet Kwon Ki-deok, which compiles the world of poetry he has been cherishing for a long time.
The poet, who debuted with the praise that “her bright and positive worldview warms the hearts of readers,” has, in this collection of poems, examined the reality faced by children with a sharp perspective and created a poetic space where they can freely express their imagination.
The poems depicting a classroom filled with soft sponge desks instead of hard square desks ("Sponge Classroom") and a playground convex like a camel's back ("Convex Playground") offer the joy of imagination and subversion that breaks existing norms.


The title work, "Ramen," uses wordplay to juxtapose ramen, a food familiar to young readers, with the connective ending "~ramen," which assumes a certain fact, to give children a powerful encouragement that they can become anything.


If I were ramen // When I exercise, I'd be a gorilla / When I want to dance, I'd be a kangaroo / When I need to talk, I'd be a parrot / When I want to swim, I'd be a seal / When I need to cooperate, I'd be an ant / When I want to travel, I'd be a swallow / When I have to walk on a dark road, I'd be an owl / When I want to help a friend, I'd be a crocodile // I want to be the most popular ramen in the world _「Ramen」

Comforting the hearts of lonely children
The bright and round embrace of the wind

In "If I Were Ramen," a child who spends time alone often appears.
The poet stays by the side of a child who is alone on the way home from school when it suddenly starts raining and listens to their secret wishes while watching a soccer game in full swing.

I went to the wind house.
You could enter without ringing the doorbell or having a friend invite you.
The windows were always open so it wasn't scary.
_「Jungle Gym」 section

The narrator of "Jungle Gym," who plays alone in an empty playground, calls the jungle gym, which has only a frame and no walls or roof, a "window house" and explores various places in the wind house, where "the windows are always open."
However, the more he climbs up and down the jungle gym, the more he becomes lonely rather than happy, and the poet does not miss the moment when the child's heart darkens as he looks at the sunset from the top of the jungle gym.
Like the wind that caresses every corner of a child's lonely heart, the poet reads the child's true 'wish' with delicate lyricism and comforts the child so that his hardened heart can "gradually become rounder."

You can go even without an invitation You can hear the rustling song of the wildflowers, and you can see the spiders ticking away as they build their nests //(…)//Sometimes a lonely giant crouches and looks at us with envious eyes You can imagine how excited we will be //This place is overflowing with roundness and roundness Everyone becomes rounder and rounder without even realizing the sun is setting _Excerpt from “Grass Playground”

A gaze that awakens us to the preciousness of small beings

Poet Kwon Ki-deok's gaze reaches even the small beings that are right next to us but that we have overlooked.
Even a small, weak-looking snail is given a cute warning that it actually has ten thousand scary teeth ("The Scary Snail"), and a tissue that is carelessly thrown away is admired as a white magnet that "tears stick to/nostrils stick to/buttocks stick to" ("Tissue").
By reading poems that elevate delicate language even from trivial matters, readers will be able to “protect small things better” (from “Poet’s Note”), as the poet wishes.
I hope that 『If I Were Ramen』 will be loved for a long time as a collection of poems filled with childlike, whimsical imagination and a tender poetic heart that embraces small beings.