Poet's words

Chapter 1: Prepare to Fall It's Time to Move

Ice cream/ After-sales service/ If you can only choose one from the display case/ Someone close to you/ Shadow/ When it finally becomes no longer a metaphor/ Answer sheet/ What questions did you have for the teacher?

Chapter 2: Let's go to the brightest place

Aotadara/ Aotadara/ Aotadara/ Aotadara/ Aotadara/ Aotadara/ Aotadara/ Aotadara/ Aotadara

Chapter 3 Hug the friend who hugged me

Object Protection / What I Left Behind / Glass That Will Spend My Life With / Clear Weather on the Anniversary / Debt and Light / How It Continues / Natural History Museum / Those People / New Friendships / Moors

Chapter 4 I'm trying to love all these scenes

When it's only me who opens and closes / Medium / Splitting stones / Cutoff / Ceremony of consciousness / Let's keep dreaming / Vacationers / Family gathering / This is not a joke, this is my true heart

Chapter 5: A Century of Bravery Glares

Who is my friend? I don't have any friends, but who are they anyway? / Cases where true stories are distorted and turned into ghost stories / People cleaning glasses / Safe and smart play / I went to a department store because an event commemorating the 22nd century was being held there. I was already successful and was able to easily buy a few of the building's display windows, escalators, food courts, and lights / Business hours may be different on holidays / A little further into the future / Archiving / This story began with the breaking of a snow globe.

P.S,
campsite

Commentary | A Friend Who Doesn't Exist Yet, But Will Always Come_Choi Ga-eun (Literary Critic)

I went to the cemetery to see the snow. The small white hills were shining densely. My friend said while wiping the tombstone, "You held up well." I shook my shoes. They were wet.

I could see the sea in the distance. Let's not fall into the sea. Let's not give in to the sea. Let's live. I put my hands together and bowed my head.

I wanted to stop watching dramas about people who are already dead and listening to albums.

The corners of your mouth go up brightly while riding a kayak
Frown while changing a light bulb
Because I want to bring it back again
_「Back Ice」 part

In this collection of poems, which “does not express condolences for a departed friend, but rather writes about the friend himself” (commentary by literary critic Choi Ga-eun), the presence of ‘friends’ appears constantly.
Judging from the poetic words that follow him, such as ‘tombstone,’ ‘grave,’ and ‘funeral,’ it seems that he is undoubtedly deeply connected to death.
Chapter 1, 'Preparing to Fall, It's Time to Move', contains specific details about such a friend.
The friend is depicted as suffering, “pulling out his hair” (“After Service”), or sometimes “standing near the veranda window” and “looking outside” (“Line Shadow”), in a precarious state. Instead of trying to stop him or catch him, the speaker keeps a certain distance and watches him.
The distance suggests that my friend and I are in different worlds, but it can also be read as a worry that the ghostly friend who appears before my eyes might disappear or be ruined.
When someone criticizes the speaker, saying, “You can’t live without using it, so you can’t live universally,” the speaker replies, “It will take a long time until you find the answer,” and only “prepare to collapse” when the time comes (“What Questions Did You Have for the Teacher?”).
It's because there are things that must continue even after they collapse.


Chapter 2, “Let’s go to the brightest place,” unfolds the virtual space of “Aotadara.”
The fact that all eight of the included works are given the same title, "Aotadara," makes the entire chapter feel like a separate world.
Here, the friend is described as having “chosen the path of the ghost himself three years ago,” and the narrator praises his choice to suddenly abandon a world full of injustice, saying, “It was his courage.”


I'm taking care of my friend
My friends are getting organized because of me.

Have you ever heard the word "understanding"? Every time I hear that question, my mind wanders.
I started limping. From there, the daylight continued. I lifted my friend's face and held him in my arms.

I thought of a friend who had been swept away by a river. My friend came to mind. The day I saved my friend.

I thought, let's go to the brightest place, the safest place.
_「Aotadara」 part

While quietly discovering that “his friend’s forehead is cold and soft” and “his friend’s bare feet are pale,” and dreamily imagining countless possibilities of being able to love together and “envision the future,” the speaker prepares to “slowly lay his friend down in a sunny spot.”
In this way, a friend becomes an object of mourning, and this experience of loss, in turn, becomes a process of filling the gap in life.
Above all, because I am still “alive,” I am a person who knows how to “eat watermelon with the fan on” and feel the “refreshing feeling of rinsing my sticky hands with cold water.”
In Park Gyu-hyun's poetry, friends act as beings who make us feel this sense of life more vividly through absence.


In Chapter 3, “Hug the Friend Who Hugs Me,” the speaker confronts the harsh reality of the world in earnest.
In a violent world where discriminatory language such as “Christmas age” and “I could break your wrists” (“Those People”) runs rampant, I feel the pressure of having to live alone amidst others who are rude to me as if I were breathing.
This awareness that one is “trapped in an unjust disconnection from the normal world” (commentary) leads to a realization of the weight of life, accepting that one can live and “grow old slowly” and that one must “endure for a long time” (How to Last).


Because this is poetry, I can sit on a beach where the sun never sets for days. I can fill the sand with seashells. I can become a body that doesn't leave a speck of dust no matter how much I shake it. I can meet friends I've never seen before. I can make my friends disappear the moment they stagger back in. Because this is poetry.
_「The Suspended」 section

For his friends and himself, who remain trapped in the countless absurdities of life, the poet creates an ideal world, if only in poetry.
The world of "The Hangovers," where I live with my proud friends who have grown up to be "harmonious, prosperous, and fair-minded women," is possible because it is poetry.
In the following chapter 4, “I’m Trying to Love All of These Scenes,” the poet once again faces the daily life of having to “worry about whether or not to call an ambulance because of the menstrual cup” (“Sharing Pebbles”) and the external world filled with violent words such as “Women are savage animals” and “Women are not supposed to block men’s gaze” (“Family Gathering”).
Sensing a social climate that demands that one graduate from a “four-year university” and have “no history of physical disability or mental illness,” the poet brings the representations of the “ideal” human who have been “selected” to the “cliff” (“Cutoff”).
“This is poetry” (“The Moors”), but even though that doesn’t mean the real hardships will disappear, somehow I “stubbornly survive” (“Let’s Just Keep Dreaming”), and declare that “all these scenes are unfamiliar” but “I’m trying to love them” (“Vacationers”).

Once, he and I went to the theater to watch a play, ate kalguksu (noodles), and chatted for a long time at a coffee shop. But in the end, he chose to be stuffed. That was the final performance. As artists who made a living, we would mutter to ourselves every time we passed by a department store around Christmas time. I like expensive things too…

(……)

My friend will become the symbol of that department store. No one can surpass me. I paid the price because I wrote it like this. Everyone, look at him. A century of bravery is glaring there now.

_「I went to the department store because there was an event commemorating the 22nd century there. I was already successful and could easily buy a few things from the building's display windows, escalators, food court, and lighting.」

In Chapter 5, ‘A Century of Bravery Glares’, the decision of a friend to abandon the world is engraved in me as ‘bravery’.
I still “know nothing” about life (“Cases of True Stories Distorted and Turned into Ghost Stories”), but I do know that, like a hangnail that keeps growing back no matter how much you try to remove it, some inevitable things are bound to “happen and happen” (“Business hours may vary on holidays”).
So, I just send off my friends who are leaving with a greeting like, “You should go to a sunny place” (“Business hours may vary on holidays”) or “Take a look/go” (“Archiving”).

While the process of 'mourning' is often about encouraging the bereaved to gather their thoughts and sort out their memories, for Park Kyu-hyun, mourning is about constantly calling back to the one he misses and dreaming of a continued connection.
This collection of poems, which consists of six chapters, starting with Chapter 1 and ending with a 'Postscript,' is like a letter sent to us.
To become a lasting story that will be remembered forever.
Taking the form of a new friendship that encompasses “from this world to the next” (“Archiving”).

Park Gyu-hyun's friend is not written to be remembered, but to postpone death beyond death, to comfort it, and ultimately to bring it back.
Writing to friends at this time is the most intimate and close form of contact, not to allow friends to disappear or, on the contrary, remain as vivid beings, not to be stuffed into a single sentence of a festival, but simply to go sightseeing with them every day.
Now we can say that Park Gyu-hyun's poetry is the hands that drag the coffin of a dead friend, the feet that tread the dirt of a graveyard, and the endless sentences that call friends before our sparkling presence.
When his poetry writes about the friend itself, the friend is right here, as an 'it' that is not yet there and is always coming.
_Choi Ga-eun, in the commentary

A Mini-Interview with Poet Park Gyu-hyun

1.
Three years have passed since my first poetry collection, “Everyone I Am Loved.”
I'm curious about your thoughts on publishing your second poetry collection and what you wanted to express in it.


After publishing my first poetry collection, I was obsessed with a strange obsession for quite some time.
'The world I embraced while writing my first poetry collection must now be completely tied up.' I thought it would be less noisy if I just stopped writing, but that wasn't the case.
I just kept writing something or wanted to write something and left myself alone, and then I just naturally figured it out.
The fact that binding manuscripts into a poetry collection doesn't mean that a world is complete; there are still worlds that remain 'open'.
In particular, while putting together this poetry collection, I changed all the expressions of ‘you’ in the first draft to ‘friend.’
Then, the problem that had been plaguing me for the past few years became clearer.
This collection of poems contains stories of my friends and I, who try to straighten our bodies even when we are hunched over, and of how we try to observe that in a healthy way.


2.
There are many poems that make you feel a deep sense of longing and affection.
The title, ‘I’ll go find a new friendship’, is what the ‘friend’ in the poem ‘New Friendship’ said to the speaker, ‘me’.
Please tell us what made you write this sentence and how you came to choose it as the title.

While I was putting together and publishing these two poetry collections, I tried to understand the friends I would never see again.
I also had faith that everyone was doing well somewhere.
As I struggled to bear the sadness that weighed on me, at some point I began to hope that the loss of my friends would not remain as painful for me or for them.
I started to imagine what it would be like if they gave me a cheerful greeting, and that's how I came to write the sentence, "I'm going to go find new friendships."
While I was agonizing over a title for my poetry collection with my editor, I came across this sentence and thought, 'This is it!'
If we can think of the large theme of this poetry collection as 'friend', then it would feel natural to use a friend's words as the title.
I liked that when I looked at the sentences separately, it sounded like I was saying them.
When we were children, we would run around the playground with our friends, and when it was time to go home, we would wave our hands in the air and say goodbye.
'I'll be back for a bit.
It would be great if it could also be read as 'Let's play again next time.'


3.
The unique composition also stands out.
Chapter 2 is also made up of a virtual world called 'Aotadara'.
What is the author's unique perspective that he or she particularly focused on while compiling the psalms into a book?

This collection of poems is like a letter to me.
I tried organizing the poetry collection into chapters instead of parts, and hoped that when each chapter title was read separately, it would flow as one breath.
The poem "Campsite," which is included in the "Postscript" added at the end, is also a poem that is connected to the first poetry collection.
In many ways, I wanted to emphasize the sense of 'continuity'.
I hope that the entire structure of this collection of poems will not be a linear sequence of mourning for the readers, but rather a work of mourning that cannot help but be cyclical, a work of mourning that will inevitably continue.


4.
If you had to pick one piece from the collection that you cherish the most, what would it be and why?

These are the "suspended ones."
This is a poem in which the speaker says that he can do anything because “this is poetry,” but in fact, I was in a bad mood for a few months after writing this poem.
This is because it was a work that allowed me to capture the sense of freedom I usually felt through writing poetry, while also reminding myself that writing poetry is the way I can most clearly sense my friends.
As the poem says, “It really breaks down,” and I was heartbroken.
But every time I read this poem again, I feel that same passion in me and I find myself drawn to it again and again.
I also think that this poem runs through the entire collection of poems.


5.
This is a collection of poems that conveys the struggle of a person who is in pain but continues to try to remember.
If you have your own unique attitude or determination toward loss in everyday life, please share it with us.

There was a time when I was quite confident in my memory.
After experiencing a loss that was so difficult to bear, it became the thing I was most unsure of.
So these days, I've been trying to talk to myself from time to time.
It's good to remember everything perfectly, but it's also okay if you can't remember everything in detail.
Don't forget that you are doing well now.
I hope this collection of poems can be a small source of strength to those who are going through similar times as I did.

Poet's words

This creepily strange world
To me who wants to face it head on

To show you what bravery is
Willing to lend courage

Precious and precious
My friends

You can come here anytime
You can forget this place anytime

June 2025
Park Kyu-hyun