Jin Eun-young’s poetry is “beautiful and political.” This expression comes from the poet’s own considerations over the schism that emerges between social engagement and engaged poetry—when we raise our voice at society through poetry, can that voice avoid falling into cliché? If so, can we ensure the words spoken in that voice remain political?—but it is now used by most as a description of the poetic oeuvre she herself has built. Perhaps at some point we’ve simply come to think of it as the proper description of her poetry. Since the entrenchment of neoliberalism in Korean society during the 2000s, whenever there has been a political struggle or societal tragedy, and literature has not shrunk from the moment but bravely engaged  in literary fashion, Jin Eun-young’s poetry has been there to speak. When her poem “Seven Word Dictionary” established the poet as a figure who composes a dictionary of their own and defined “Capitalism” as a “darkness of all shapes and colors” offering no way to “make it through alone,” we as readers felt the intense power of “beautiful and political” poetry.

      But think about it. How does this curious phrase, which may seem almost oxymoronic to some, become possible in poetry? What gives rise to poetry that is at once beautiful and political? Here we must always be wary of rhetoric. What I’d like to discuss is how Jin Eun-young’s poetry works ceaselessly to write the “beautiful and political” site of struggle, how it refuses to give up on passion for a better world even as it stomachs an aching life, how it can say that after “blood, sweat, death” comes “song,” as in her poem “As Always.”

      The core of the phrase “beautiful and political” is and—the realization of beauty and politics at once. This “and” links the seemingly distant realms of aesthetics and politics, autonomy and engagement , folding them together in a single place. A poetry which is charged with poetic language in and of itself and which reminds the reader of social realities and leads them to picture the next reality at once. A poetry which makes a radical political argument and which exerts aesthetic power, a grip on beauty, to political effect at once. Jin Eun-young’s poetry extends in the temporal setting of at once. Perhaps we could also say that poetry itself only forms when an A and B of utterly disparate aspects are present at once. The poem thereby intimates that A and B were perhaps never so different after all.

      In “The Truth” we see that “the water” is at once a place of “unmoving stars” and moving “stillness.” The silence fallen over the world holds a secret which can’t be kept silent. Poetry begins by telling us that no probable situation in this world can be read in only one way, that a line once written is overlain with other meanings. In this poem, we find the truth that “there was a child who fell in the water” alongside the truth that “the child still skips safely across the hearts of loved ones / Like steppingstones across the water.” Because there is no “reason why that person had to die,” the reason also sounds “like a wandering song.” The truths that surround us do not present themselves clearly in a single visage. Rather, the truths of “the living, the dead” are there, each coexisting in the same world.

      Readers long familiar with Jin’s poems will remember “every facial expression” that is there hiding somewhere, even when we close our eyes and try not to look at the world in the poem “All Gone,” the first in her first collection Seven Word Dictionary. Or the speaker who claims there are times when “all we can do is say there is” about an “unverifiable presence” in the poem, “There is,” the first from her third collection, Stolen Song. By the time we arrive at the poem “The Truth” in her fourth collection, I Love You Like an Old Street, it seems as if the poet is imparting to us that even things which have crossed over the border into the unseen are in this world, that some truths wander the world forever, kept secret in the darkness. Poetry tells. It tells us that the unseen hold their place within us in their most intense form precisely because they are unseen. That the stories we don’t want to tell, precisely because we don’t want to tell them, are placed within this world in their most intense telling, which must eventually be told. That our lives are full of things that are at once, despite having utterly disparate meanings. That sometimes this truth consoles us, and sometimes it assails us.

      The temporality of at once is also expressed in the powerful impression exuded by images which coexist despite not going together or feeling right for each other. In “The Pianist of Fate,” the “morning” of “each and every day” brings hope for the unfurling of a new everyday life, but it approaches with the “black feathers plucked from its bright naked body,” shivering in the cold. In “A Field of Red Four-Leaf Clover,” we hear “the train’s wheels screech,” the sad sound of things which must come to a stop, alongside the complaint “Can I be hopeless even though I’m old?” This tells us that the sadness of someone who has just realized that “forever” is nothing more than a made-up word is always bound to intersect with the sigh of someone who has just realized that, in this life, some things are forever after all. How about the poem “Feels Right for You”? Here we find a scene of “you” keeping the “childhood secrets” of a “blood-soaked afternoon,” embracing a crumpled hope and an all-too-short sadness in your heart as you “swim through darkness and walk through light,” “hand in hand” with “me.” Those who couldn’t walk alongside others in the past begin to walk together. In short, Jin Eun-young’s poetry is to be discovered in the unfamiliar juxtapositions of which life consists.

      Let’s think about “In Houyhnhnmland.” Taking the fictional ideal society of Gulliver’s Travels as its title, this poem turns the ideal into something peculiar. Here, the ideal society is a place which takes pride in the attitude that “We can always watch death / Close by as well” because “We can just imagine—it’s so far away.” A place that leaves us with an uneasy feeling, where the ideal permits the strange.[1]  In other words, whenever the here and now provides a sense of comfort, as in Houyhnhnmland, we must vigilantly remind ourselves where we are. The heat of a “campfire” may be “warm” to some, but to those who have recognized the “long-vanished” “screams” it covers up, it is something much more terrifying. Such unfamiliar juxtaposition is a method which places two completely different things side by side at once to convey the ambivalence of our lives, a form which contains the truth of a world in which we live always with something out of place that doesn’t feel right.

      In “Mom,” it is “like paying taxes,” doing a civic duty, for the poet to visit her mother. She wonders what it’s like for her mother, but she doesn’t ask. She only guesses that her mother would say it was “like giving alms, her whole body trembling with devotion.” Some love points our eyes far beyond the beloved in a relation of obligation and devotion toward each other. One side feels an obligation without even knowing what the other wants, and the other side offers devotion without thinking how the other feels. Some relationships lean disjointedly upon each other even while persisting over a long period of time. This poem tells a story that wouldn’t be out of place in any mother–daughter relationship in this world. Or, we could put it another way. A person can love a certain world while that world doesn’t love them in the same way—these two things can coexist. The ambiguity of poetic language is written by those who have noticed life’s ambivalence.

      As a woman and a poet, Jin Eun-young is particularly sensitive to the ambivalence of life. For those who are too easily cast out of this world, the visceral experience of life itself is a series of unfamiliar juxtapositions. In order not to neglect this condition as it is, in order to draw up life-saving song from the gaps of disjunction, poetry is essential. Poetry teaches a different way of interpreting the pain that seeps out when life’s ambivalences make themselves felt. For instance, “Like the patients / Sitting […] in the waiting room’s / Folding chairs / Hearing the nurse call their name” and “pass[ing] through the doors” in the poem “Someday, After You,” some live a life of waiting to be pronounced the next to die, but poetry whispers to them the possibility that they “sit in the chair of being,” that standing up from this chair is to “offer the seat” not to death, but to the beginning of something else. This offers those who must live as if they are “soon to stand and offer the seat” a way to replenish the substance of their lives.

      Thus, as in “There is Paper,” poetry is written whenever “the most disappointing creation[s]” are confidently brought into use on “thin” paper. Or should we say poetry is written on paper which is itself the “most disappointing creation” where so many countless things come to pass—“Always eating and drinking, love burning with abandon,” “White ash scattering in the empty mouth of the wind.” Or is poetry written on paper so easily engulfed in flame so that “the heat of the things turned to ash” inside “a fresh urn” can be written there, or so thin that “reality” easily “crumples like fantasy” and can “best be described” there? On this subject, this essay offers only the following: Poetry is born when completely different things are all there at once.

      Completely different things coming together. This is also the fundamental principle of love. When one person walks with another, when they follow the same path despite stumbling out of step with each other, love finds its beginning. And love persists tenaciously, undestroyed even amid a world of unceasing war, disaster, tragedy, and violence. When the world wears us out and torments us to no end, we continue to love at one and the same time. Even through our tears, we read and write poetry.

      Once long ago, I stood in a cold street and watched, amid a protest of irregular workers who shouted out demands to overturn their wrongful dismissal, as Jin Eun-young recited word by word, in a voice trembling but clear, a poem evoking Kafka’s hunger artist. The poem was not composed of lines to right the wrong of the situation, but to draw out another, different meaning from it. I think it was then that I had the faint realization that some love begins from an instance of discord with the world, at one and the same time. Jin Eun-young’s poetry is beautiful and political at once. Holding that double tension and weight, it defends the dignity of poetry to the bitter end.

Translated by Seth Chandler

Kyung Eon Yang debuted as a literary critic in the pages of Contemporary Literature in 2011. Her works include the collection of critical essays How to Say Hello. She has been awarded the Shin Dong-yup Literary Award.
 

[1] Translator’s Note: This line relies upon a pun between the word for “ideal” and the word for “strange, peculiar, abnormal,” which are homophones in Korean. The connotations of “strange” should be taken as “disturbing, uncanny, grotesque.”