Oh Eun, how are you? As a longtime reader and admirer of your poetry, I’m so glad to get this chance to interview you. But first things first: would you mind briefly introducing yourself to readers overseas who’ve taken an interest in Korean literature?

Hello. I’m Oh Eun, and I write poems. I usually introduce myself with the phrase “I write poems,” instead of “I’m a poet” because the act of writing gives me a kind of on-the-cusp feeling. Whenever I’m writing poetry, I feel as though I’m always just about to arrive somewhere. Even after I write the final line of a poem, I always sit there scratching my head for a while. It’s because I’m still writing something in my mind. Maybe I actually have arrived somewhere, but I’m already trying to figure out where to take my next step. I’ll read you the quote on my business card. “Occasionally writing, always thinking of writing. Always living, but only occasionally feeling alive.” I feel most alive when I’m writing a poem.

I’d like to ask you about your career path. You majored in sociology at Seoul National University and received a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST, two majors that are not closely related. You’ve also worked at a big data company, and since then as an author, newspaper and magazine contributor, cultural director, podcast host, lecturer, and so on. Where did this surprisingly colorful experience come from? And has this ‘career of transitions’ influenced your writing in any way?

Now that you ask, I wonder if I should have just stayed in my own lane. I’ve always been extremely curious, ever since I was young. I was a headstrong little kid who always wanted to try whatever someone else was doing. Luckily, if I tried it and realized it wasn’t for me, I gave up easily. Of course, that was usually because something else caught my interest.

        As an adult, one of my biggest motivations has been the opportunity to try different things. Not because I was good at any of them, but because I believed that stepping into a new field and working to acclimate myself to it would make me a better person. Rather than working hard to get better at something I wasn’t good at, I wanted to understand a variety of things from all different walks of life.

        Looking back, I think all those experiences had an influence on my poetry writing. I feel like dedicating myself to various fields helped cultivate my ability to see. It was a process of understanding where my line of sight 
(蒘鉌) comes to rest, what point of view (蒘懘) I take in looking at a thing, and what might change from a different angle of vision (蒘岆). All of this seeps into my poetry without me even realizing it. There are many traits that might be important for a poet to have, but I think my real talent is my curiosity.

After your debut in Modern Poetry, your first book of poetry was The Pigs at Hotel Tassel. One of my favorite poems in that collection is “0.5.” The speaker experiences the abstract world of rational numbers, beyond whole numbers like one and two. This is realized through lines like, “you first called me your eyesight on the chart at the optometrist—in October I became the morning temperature—then I became the thickness of your pencil lead—and went to school with you everyday.” Your first collection is full of this ‘speech of possibility,’ which somehow conveys the lived experience of this kind of abstraction. In turn, your most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness, is filled with ‘undefined speech.’ What has changed between your first and most recent collections, and what hasn’t?

Just as the poem “0.5” looks at the world from the perspective of the number 0.5, I’d say this effort at ‘becoming’ is one of the most important elements of my poetry writing. In The Pronoun for Nothingness, I tried to do that entirely in the form of pronouns. I think I wanted to tell the story of things that have to struggle to reveal their existence without being specifically named. The world of a pronoun can firmly fix something in place while also coming across as completely unknowable to someone who can’t follow it. That ambivalence was the impetus for these poems.

        Over the past twenty years that I’ve been writing poetry, what I’ve said over and over is, “writing is hard.” Because I’ve put so much of what I want to say into poetry over that time without even realizing it, it feels like writing poetry is getting steadily more difficult. But strangely, this difficulty, this obscurity, also makes me want to write it. Because it’s hard, I want to try harder and get it right. Because it’s so obscure, I want to move closer to see more  clearly. So far, I’ve never felt that writing was anything but difficult. On the other hand, some things have changed. In the past, poetry felt like a finish line on an athletic field or a final goal to be scored, but now it feels like a vast, open ocean. A place with no center and nothing that could fully represent it. I actually can’t swim, but when I’m writing poetry, I feel like I’m happily swimming this way and that across a boundless sea.

They say some poems have the prophetic quality of declaring the poet’s identity. In “He,” I pictured your face the moment I read the line, “He was called the pronoun for laughter.” It’s my opinion that, of all Korean poets, you may be the one who writes the funniest poems. Whenever I encounter your sense of humor, I feel totally weightless and free. What meaning and possibility do laughter and humor have for you as a poet?

I like to laugh, so I’ve always wanted to be funny. Not that I wanted to be a comedian. I just wanted to be someone who could give people a laugh here and there. I didn’t want that laughter to come from tearing someone else down, but to bloom out of casting off my own pretensions. The way I make use of humor in poetry is definitely different from my everyday life, but I still believe in the power of laughter that grows out of literature. Laughter lightens heavy stories and helps us find warmth in cold, hard situations. Actually, maybe I started using wordplay and puns because I believed that, if I started a serious story like it was no big deal and got people to laugh a little as they read, a moment would come when I could suddenly hit them over the head with something heavy. I have a vivid memory of watching a silent Charlie Chaplin film that made me laugh hysterically until suddenly I was crying instead. That’s when I realized something. Laughter and tears are one and the same. Joy and sorrow are in cahoots. Sometimes, if you take the funniest poem and flip it around, it becomes the most unnerving or the saddest.

Whenever I read one of your collections, I always keep a dictionary by my side. I have to prepare for a rush of unfamiliar words: “the stoneflue is a path beneath the bakestone floor” (“We”),  “rubicund” (“Suggestion”), “lambent,” “slatternly” (Wearing Green). Reading your poems feels like exploring the outer reaches of the native language we thought we knew so well. Almost like a linguistic telescope. Why do you take such an interest in vocabulary?

To me, words are like toy blocks. Just as you can stack up blocks to build a house or a factory, when I write a poem, I combine words to build sentences and imagine those sentences coming together to form a building I’ve never seen before. Maybe each of us is in a solitary struggle to create our own unique building. In architecture, some people prioritize choosing the best plot of land, and others look for the best materials. My land and materials are all words. Putting words on top of words, words next to words, I’ve naturally formed a close relationship with the dictionary. Even words we think we know well turn out to have new aspects when we find them in the dictionary, and words we’ve never seen before sometimes taste sweet when we first roll them over on our tongues. After all, it’s because we have words that we can express our ideas, create sentences, and ultimately write poetry. I write poems in Korean, and it’s a joy, in my native language, to discover an unfamiliar face to a word I know well or recognize a familiar face on a word I’ve never seen. Many of my poems have started from just one word.

Is there any special Korean word you’d like to introduce to foreign readers? If so, feel free to tell us anything you’d like about what it means, why it’s special, and how it sounds and feels.

In English, being dead and buried in one’s grave is referred to as being “six feet under.” I imagine digging a hole that deep—the full height of a person—to lay a body to rest. The act of digging down into the ground might be seen as calmly reinscribing the traces left behind on Earth by the deceased. In Korea, being buried after death is sometimes referred to as “ttangbotaem” (literally “ground contribution”). It’s both a wonderful metaphor for death and a reference to the cycle of life. It expresses a sense of hope that death is not an end but a chance to contribute to the earth, from which all things grow, and the conviction that the dead will be born again as new sprouts or saplings.

There’s always something mysterious to me about the word “eogam” (nuance, connotation, the texture or feel of a word; literally “word-feel”). It’s not something you can literally feel, like the weather or the changing of the seasons, but words definitely give us some kind of feeling. I’ve yet to meet anyone who knows words as accurately as you, or who uses them as freely. I want to ask about your thoughts on the word “eogam.”

Eogam. That’s a great word, isn’t it? It’s always surprising that a word can convey a feeling all on its own. The way that “you” and “thou,” “blue” and “azure” are different. We already talked about the dictionary, but as a child I always wanted to say things precisely. It wasn’t enough for something to be good, I wanted to go deeper and know why and how it was good. If I write the word “soft,” I question whether that’s really the right word, and if it doesn’t measure up, I try to come up with a word to replace it . Sometimes I leave a blank for the right word, and go for a walk. And sometimes I find the word I’m looking for—the moment you realize it’s not sick, but uncomfortable, not excited, but more like carried away. The moment something is expressed in language, it gets defined, but this is also just a matter of wanting to say what I have to say as best I can.

The poets I’ve met always compare you as a poet to a small child. They say that Oh Eun is a child at heart or that there is a child at the heart of Oh Eun’s poetry. In fact, your own answer to the question of who you see as your role model can be found in Wearing Green: “if I must choose one, then it must be children.” What can you tell us about your work through the keyword “childhood”?

Curiosity is the reason I think of children as my role model. Children are always curious. I’ve been told I was the type of child that always asks, “Why?” I wanted to know it all. What is this place where I was born? Why do the trees change their clothes in the fall? Why does tomorrow come after today? Why are there holidays? Why is that yellow flower called “forsythia”? Why does a year have 365 days? Why do some years have 366 days? So many things to be curious about. Once I realized that asking adults had limits, I started reading diligently. But if you read, you find even more questions than answers. I think that might be why I started writing.

        Children also have a transparent quality. When they play together, things like gender, nationality, religion, and family circumstances don’t hold them back. They just want to know each other, to jump and play and enjoy being together. Games resolve in victory or defeat, but play begins just because it’s fun, then occasionally stops for a moment before beginning again. For children, knowing someone’s name is all it takes to be friends, and they cherish the time and space they share together. Who wouldn’t feel admiration for a person like that? It’s so different from the way adults try to prove themselves by drawing endless distinctions with others. We often link the physical process of maturation to becoming an adult, but I think the heart and mind can grow a lot even after reaching adulthood. Someone whose heart has grown up well will be able to look at others clearly, without prejudice, and maintain a curious mind about the world.

I’d also like to know about you personally. The Oh Eun I know is warm and cheerful, always laughing and making jokes. As the critic Kim Sang-hyeok has said, you’re also someone who “never simply passes by a person begging in the street or the old folks selling chocolate and gum.” How do you think this personality is revealed through or appears in your writing?

I suppose that makes me think of the characters in my poems. Not only the human characters but also the animals, plants, and objects. My heart goes out to things that are always there but which no one pays attention to. The person who has a name but is never called on, the plant that appears to be growing just fine while its roots are rotting away, an object which is used every day but never gets to show its true face—theirs are the stories I want to hear. Simply striking up a conversation could seem impolite, so I cautiously imagine. It’s a process of attaching a mouth to something that’s never had a chance to tell its own story. Of course, a large portion of myself finds its way in too. Weak and squishy, liable to double over at the drop of a hat, going from hope to despair and back multiple times a day—me, myself. For me, the blank page is the place where the being is reborn. Sometimes amazing things happen, sometimes a failure becomes a way to bounce back stronger, and sometimes I search my whole life for something without ever figuring it out. I just want to tell their stories in my own way. Sad stories told humorously, funny stories told devastatingly, devastating stories told indifferently. Perhaps this is how humor functions in my poetry.

A world teeming with pronouns unfolds from the pages of your most recent collection, The Pronoun for Nothingness. Pronouns are an interesting subject, when you think about it. Nouns were created to refer to various objects, and then we use pronouns to refer back to those nouns once more. In other words, until a pronoun refers to any specific thing, it is filled only with possibility. It brings to mind the linguistic concept of the dummy subject, like the impersonal pronoun “it” in English. Your recent poetry is filled with this kind of placeholder or blank. Could you tell us more about this ‘poetic negative space’?

As I wrote The Pronoun for Nothingness, it gave me the feeling of sand slipping through my fingers. Let’s say there’s a proper noun that attains existence at the moment of its naming. In the very next sentence, it is replaced by a pronoun. “It” meets with another “it.” “That” gets placed next to another “that.” Sure, the meaning isn’t difficult to gather from context, but that’s just the reader’s perspective. I wanted to tell the noun’s story—the noun whose existence fades among the endless pronouns. In order to do that, I had to go back up the chain of the naming process. How did it get that name, who gave it that name, and could it have a different name? Then I realized something. The moment we name it, the referent is trapped within that name—the way the sky unfurls in our minds, the moment we read a poem titled “Sky.” In other words, it occurred to me that naming something immediately blocks its potential to expand any further. Then I wanted to write exactly the opposite kind of poem, one that would use the pronoun to remind us of the noun, and then once more the proper noun. I wanted to go back to before the reference, back to when the possibilities for interpretation were plentiful. At that point, the blanks or ‘poetic negative space’ that you mentioned become a space to be filled in from the experiences and imagination of the writer and reader. A space that exists as emptiness, that arises again as nothingness.

In “That,” you write, “There is something / Its name escapes me […] Here I am / Not knowing its name.” It seems like not knowing something, leaving it blank, is a way to explore possibility. This refusal to inconsiderately seize control of meaning feels like a kind of linguistic democratization. Maybe laying down established meanings and facing each other blankly makes a new encounter possible. What do you think of the reading of your poetry as a ‘sociological imaginary of language’?

One thing I considered carefully when writing The Pronoun for Nothingness was distance. The distance between “me” and “you,” the distance between “me” and “them,” the distance that grows within the community of “us,” and the inevitable distance between “me” and “myself.” When people feel they know for certain, they are bound to make the mistake of jumping to conclusions or judging too quickly. Even the context that has shaped our lives can act as a kind of bias, and when it does, it can be helpful to place ourselves in a state of ignorance. You have to, to exercise discernment. Since it’s important to imagine other lives and try to think from other people’s perspectives, I suppose you could call this a ‘sociological imaginary of language,’ as you put it.

        Looking back over the time I’ve spent on poetry, I think ‘not knowing’ has been an important impetus for my writing. I used to think I was writing to learn what I didn’t know, but at some point, I altered that idea. Now it feels more like I write so that, whatever I don’t know, I can not know it well. The geography of my poetic practice has changed—maintaining a willing distance from the object, knowing nothing in order to clear the mind of prejudice, approaching from as transparent a state as possible. When something doesn’t reveal its essence no matter how closely you approach it, you can’t help but be humbled. You know, if you touch a soap bubble, it pops. All you can do is watch with a blank stare, cleared of all language, discipline, order, and so on. Knowing nothing. And while you’re at it, know it well.

You’ve written, “I don’t write father but dad. I don’t call him father, I call him dad” (Patting). Have you noticed that your poetry collections always include the people you care about? The way a compass always points north, at the end of your poetry there is always a person. I’ve always thought that was so beautiful. “People hold people in a warm embrace” (“Good Person”). So I’ve always wanted to ask you, what are people to you?

A riddle to which the answer changes every second? Of course you know the Korean proverb, “We may know the depths of the deepest waters, but not of the shallowest person.” A reasonable person may not always make reasonable choices, and a person who’s good to me may not be a good person to others. That’s why I try to empty myself and become transparent before people, as I do before poetry and before words. As much as possible, I want to be free of bias in my approach to people.

        In the past, I really wanted to solve the riddle of people. But at some point, I started wanting to simply let things be and watch that subtle, complex condition. If you get too deeply involved, you can damage the essence. And if you interpret things however you like, you can only ever create a distortion. The riddle is interesting, but at the same time, you can’t know its inner workings. You can’t be too quick to guess the answer because the answer is always changing. You have to watch and wait to see each new aspect, which could appear at any time. I think that’s what makes a person someone we care about, a special someone.

Looking back on your poetry, you’re always trying something new and different. I’d like to call this poetic career of self-reinvention a ‘history of courage.’ Is there a world of language you’re hoping to unfold after The Pronoun for Nothingness? Tell us about some of your new interests and themes. And, if I may ask, do you have any books in the works for us?

As I take a moment to look over the poetry I’ve been writing since my last collection, it seems I’m writing a lot about ‘traces’ and ‘time differences’. But it’s hard to know while I’m still writing. I usually only realize the direction I’m moving in after a certain amount of time has passed. The process itself almost seems like a metaphor for traces and time differences, but while I can never know what scenes await me on this journey, I try to not know well. I don’t know where I’m going, but I hope there will be laughter and tears, joy and sadness there.

Translated by Seth Chandler

Ko Myeong-jae is the author of the poetry collection Closing Our Eyes When We Kiss and the prose collection When I Miss You Too Much It Snows. He is a professor of creative writing at Keimyung University.

Korean Works Mentioned:

•    Oh Eun, “That,” “He,” “We,” The Pronoun for Nothingness (Moonji Publishing, 2023)

     오은, 「그것」, 「그」, 「우리」, 『없음의 대명사』 (문학과지성사, 2023)

•    Oh Eun, “0.5,” The Pigs at Hotel Tassel (Minumsa, 2009)

     오은, 「0.5」, 『호텔 타셀의 돼지들』 (민음사, 2009)

•    Oh Eun, Patting (Nanda, 2020)

     오은, 『다독임』 (난다, 2020)

•    Oh Eun, “Suggestion,” The Left Hand’s Feelings are Hurt (Hyundae Munhak, 2018)

     오은, 「암시」, 『왼손은 마음이 아파』 (현대문학, 2018)

•    Oh Eun, Wearing Green (Nanda, 2024)

     오은, 『초록을 입고』 (난다, 2024)

•    Oh Eun, “Good Person,” I Had a Name (Achimdal Books, 2018) 

     오은, 「좋은 사람」, 『나는 이름이 있었다』 (아침달, 2018)

•    Kim Sang-hyeok, “The Never Misunderstood Oh-Eun,” Lyric Poetry, 2016 Winter

     김상혁, 「오해받지 않는 오은」, 『서정시학』 (2016 겨울호)

1     Translator’s Note: The word “stoneflue” is a literal translation of the word dolgorae, a less common variety of traditional Korean underfloor heating. This word is a homophone for “dolphin.” The word “bakestone floor” is my coinage for gudeuljang, the flooring used in this heating system, in which “gudeul” is etymologically derived from the phrase “baked stone” or “heated stone.” This is not a rare word in Korean, but I have repurposed the English word “bakestone” to convey it in a way that should strike English readers as both familiar and unknown, which is the effect of the line as a whole.