Part 1: When he lays the line, he believes in the void.

External connection/ comfort/ temperature/ path/ forehead of the alley/ bird, that bird/ metaphor/ cheerfulness/ first person/ thoughts of chives/ air/ Suhee/ number 101/ domino/ the smell of soap

Part 2: Don't be kind when times are tough

Candy/ Picture Frame/ The Taste of Green/ Monday's Lunchbox/ Cardigan/ Area/ Season/ Ethics/ Laughter/ Body/ Weather/ That Day/ Anniversary/ Ambiguous/ Daegu

Part 3: Doma feels like making a sound

Respect / Apple Truck / How to Get Caught at Hide and Seek / Object Play / We Like to Stop Everything / Humor / Mechanical Pencil / Buffet / That Vacation / East Sea / Mr. Hopper's Night / Pressed Flower / I Have a Favor / Rain and Laughter / The Shade Maker

Part 4: On White Parting and Black Sorrow

Cloud instrument / Minimalism / 48 degrees Celsius / Dumplings / Invitation / Geranium / We've never cried together, but we've been crying, haven't we? Gray and regret and longing / Don't tell me about your hunger first / The water is still dripping in the jade tower, but the galaxy has already made a full circle / Did they go to the place they dreamed of? / Slippers / Fado / Address / Original appearance

Preface | Poetry is a will filled with humor and jokes | Kim So-yeon (poet)

Is the era free? Is depression going away?

When the group is leaning a little more

A man who introduced himself as living in the South stood up
He said he would buy my sadness
_「Cheerful」 part

The poet carefully examines the origins of the sorrow that weighs on people.
The speakers who say, “It is so thin that the word ‘neck’ is added to the pitiful sadness” (from “Temperature”) are each immersed in sadness.
This is because the sadness is difficult to stop because of a series of events such as the deaths of those close to them (“If you remember one person, it’s a dead person,” “Suhee”), a world that “barely/ teaches premature, self-restraint, and modesty” (“Metaphor”), “the news of the tender green across the street shedding blood” (“Thinking of Chives”), and “a certain violence that asks if weakness can also be strength” (“First Person”).


However, these sorrows are like one side of a coin, and even when Lee Gyu-ri is immersed in sorrow, she does not hesitate to turn it over to the other side of cheerfulness.
As he says, “If I could say the same thing tomorrow morning/ Man, I will live that cheerfulness” (“Cheerfulness”), he gives his due place to the cheerfulness waiting for its turn, either in the person next to him or within him.
Only then does sadness change from being something negative to be overcome to becoming the basis for fostering joy.
Like this, Lee Gyu-ri's uniquely refreshing poetic moments likely stem from a deep understanding of the truth of life: that sadness and laughter circulate without betraying each other.

I changed the name of the potato to a mole.

The chair turned around

Things are wriggling outside the shooting range

Even if you look through two mirrors, there are blind spots.

I write a diary that says today is emptiness, tomorrow is prospects.
I'll read you as a hedgehog

Doma feels like making a sound
_「Playing with Things」 section

Lee Gyu-ri's poetry begins with observing the objects right in front of me that make up my daily life.
Looking at the tomatoes spilling down the stairs, he thinks, “Have the sentences of my life ever rolled with such force (…) The drops and drops make a sound like a cymbals” (“Monday’s Lunchbox”), and imagines that Doma “feels like making a sound.”
For Lee Gyu-ri, wordplay is like “a tightrope walker letting go of his hands in the air” and “grabbing the air to avoid falling” (“Air”).
It is a skill that a person with a lot of vanity uses to confront the world, and as he says, “The reason I endured the heaviness of life/ was because it was heavy” (“Humor”), it is a skill that uses the weight in reverse and simply overcomes it.


Many poems attempt to impart wisdom by directly or indirectly using aphorisms, but they usually end up being driven by a desire to claim to be the final destination of aporia.
Because the pursuit of wisdom has been distorted into a pursuit of answers.
(…) The brilliant aphorisms born from Lee Gyu-ri’s poetry have a unique charm that is different from other poems at this very point.
Because it tends to lead aporia to a bigger aporia.
As an aphorism, it dismantles aphoristic expectations and thoughts.
In this case, dismantling becomes a way of reviving.
Just as a rolling tomato revives a tomato, an aphorism that dismantles a definition revives an aphorism.
(…) The aphorisms that appear in this collection of poems are sharp and sharp like a knife in a single line.
It cuts down in one stroke all the other books that pile up wisdom like a tower.
_Kim So-yeon's preface, "Poetry is a will full of humor and jokes"

In "Why Do We Need So Many Lovers," aphorisms that add warm will to persistent suffering and emptiness are combined with wordplay to form a patchwork.
So, let me suggest one enjoyable way to read this collection of poems:
Crossing the aphorisms in the poetry collection without any boundaries, I transcribe the phrases that come to my mind.
Rolling the syllables in your mouth, writing freely, and imitating humor and jokes little by little in your own way.
It embodies the “way of disappearing and coming to life” (“Cloud Instrument”), overcoming the hardships, death, separation, and sadness of every moment.

I suggest the following as a comfortable way to read this collection of poems:
Living with the beings inside the house.
Living in poetry, playing out fragments of everyday life in my head.
It is a pleasure to observe how people who “sit on a convenience store stool for an hour” (“Flesh”), “kneel in a cold prayer room” and wait for “white snow, the sound of a bell, and quiet forgiveness” (“Humor”), “wish it would rain all day on a meeting day” (“Candy”) but do their best when they actually meet others, and “water a wet flower pot” (“Geranium”) work magic in their lives.
It is to experience that one can live by loving poetry, the life and people within poetry.
In summary, "Why Do We Need So Many Lovers" is an invaluable tutorial for those who want to love this world and those around them.

■ 5 Questions and 5 Answers with Poet Lee Gyu-ri

1.
It has already been four years since the publication of my previous poetry collection, “Are You the First Snow?”, which has been receiving fervent love from readers every time winter comes.
And as summer approaches, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on meeting readers again with your new poetry collection, "Why Did We Need So Many Lovers?"

- Just as I am afraid of publishing a new poetry collection, I am even more cautious when meeting new readers.
You will realize that the 'first snow' in the previous collection of poems and the 'lover' in the new collection of poems, which may sound romantic, actually represent 'futility' and 'regret', respectively.
If a superficial interpretation were possible, I wouldn't have used that title.
With this new collection of poems, I look forward to seeing how you, with your delicate human eye, will view the changing face of sorrow.


2.
I felt that joy and sadness intertwined in a colorful way throughout the poetry collection.
I also thought that sadness pays attention to cheerfulness, and cheerfulness is indebted to sadness, as in “I will buy that cheerfulness” (“Cheerfulness”), to the one who said “I will buy your sadness.”
I would like to ask what prompted you to delve into this two-sided relationship between joy and sorrow.

- Because we couldn't do anything more, because the sadness alone was becoming too much to bear and boring, I wanted to change something.
In the form of humor and jokes.
It's not like he's laughing out loud or grabbing someone's waist, but rather he's pretending to look away or quietly turning his head to suppress his pain.
The discerning reader will know that this is a sadder gesture.
Cheerfulness and sadness are actually one, like a Möbius strip.
“Did we know each other?” he asks, and then pretends not to know, saying, “Well, I think it was a tomato.”
And then he says it out of pity for himself.
In fact, “Sadness supported laughter // The best was already laughter” I wanted to tell you that sadness is the most kind inner language, so if we are cherishing sadness, we have already done our best in our own way.

3.
The title of the poetry collection, “Why Did We Need So Many Lovers?” seems to evoke personal sentiments at first glance, but a closer look at the collection reveals that the themes of lack and love expand to a social and contemporary dimension, as in lines like “It’s a lonely age/All day long we face only machines” (from “Mr. Hopper’s Night”).
I'd like to hear the story you want to tell with this title.

- What I would like to ask is that you expand the word ‘lover’ and interpret it in various ways.
I would like to suggest that you try substituting countless other words for 'lover'.
For example, “Why did we need so much suffering?” “Why did we need so much despair?” etc.
As you said, because of 'lack', we crave for many things and end up realizing that we are suffering from even more lack.
‘Lover’ is also another word for ‘fleeting.’
In this cutting-edge age, civilization does not eliminate poverty.
Rather, it adds weight to it.
At times like that, I hide in the land of imagination.
I like clouds.
Clouds that are free and infinitely variable.
One day, as I followed a cloud shaped like a cello, believing that I was practicing love by embracing that large instrument and hearing the sound, I made the sound of the instrument and developed countless imaginary languages ​​like the cloud, but then I suddenly stopped and asked myself.
“Why did we need so many lovers?” This sentence is like an onomatopoeia, a faint sigh in the midst of nothingness.


4.
Is there one poem you would particularly recommend to readers who have yet to pick up this collection?

- I would like to recommend “Monday’s Lunch Box.”
I hope you can empathize with the loneliness and exhaustion, the hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, the pressure of Monday, and the cheerfulness and speed that emerge from the inevitable predicament. So what? Instead of despair, I hope you can empathize with this dizzying transition, listening to the sound of the woodwind.

5.
I would like to briefly say hello to the readers who are probably associating the title and poems with the mysteriously colored poetry collection that seems both purple and pink.

- I think all lovers are lovers who have passed, and all relationships are relationships that will come again.
Because paper is made of non-paper.
We already know that love is no longer romantic.
You can start there.
It's the belief that we can be more than we are.
If we are sincere to all that exists, from a more intimate and lower place, wouldn't it be a lover and a relationship?

■ Poet's Note

All my sorrow was will.

I'm not sorry.

June 2025
Lee Gyu-ri