The poems in Sin Yong-Mok’s collection, Concealed Words, may initially throw the reader into confusion. Brother Anthony¹ suggests in his translator’s note that one’s first impression of the poems may be of “a seemingly incoherent stream of images.” If you have ever had a conversation with a person in the midst of a mental break, you may be reminded of that conversation when you begin to read. People undergoing a delusion may speak as matter-of-factly as anyone else, may be as confident as anyone else that a listener will be able to follow their logic. One poem informs us that the wind has jaws, then shows us a plastic bag and tells us that the wind has bitten it. Another poem reasons thus: “If the riverbank is a coffin, then the estuary digs graves.” A third asserts that: 

    [· · ·] Of course 

    like snowflakes briefly fluttering through the air’s empty valleys pass 

    from a silence to silence

    like the way a snowman slowly drowns in its body

    melting in the morning’s empty space

    I wanted to go flowing away to a place nobody knew. 

    But here, I was able to understand. I’ve seen snowmen drowning; I’ve wanted to go flowing away. And when I returned to those earlier poems, I was able to imagine not only the wind’s jaws, but also its windpipe (which the birds peck at). Brother Anthony suggests in the foreword that instead of trying to parse the poet’s words, we might simply follow where they take us. If we can swim behind the poet through the worlds he opens, the ways in which we perceive our own worlds will expand.

    The poems are written in a stream-of-consciousness style, perhaps the most fearless example I have ever encountered. Sin refuses to slow the flow of his ideas for our benefit. We must leap in and immediately begin to swim, and if we don’t yet know how, we must quickly learn. 

    Describing his own learning in this medium, Sin writes:

    “Poetry has taught me that my body is a place into which everything sinks and a place where everything is connected! Small things and larger things, past and present, even life and death. To show that these things exist substantially while writing poetry I came up with the idea that my body might exist! The sorrow that comes visiting  my body is proof that all these things are using my body!”

    The poet embodies all that he experiences, and even what he does not experience, but which somehow “comes visiting.” This embodiment brings with it a joy that the reader shares—a joy in the articulation of truths that transcend the bounds of logic. This joy is palpable even in Sin’s most sorrowful poems. 

    I think we may sometimes intuit more through our ears than through our eyes, and so I recommend reading these poems aloud whenever possible. Now, I, too, am thinking about the body, albeit in simpler and more earthbound terms than the poet. It is with gratitude and some discomfort that I admit to feeling as though my brain has been rearranged. Perhaps reading Sin transforms the reader into one capable of reading him. 

    Sorrow remains, but its circumstances are more openly shared with the reader—reflecting, perhaps, a growing confidence in maturity. We see sorrow particularized in the death of a parent and in the experience of heartbreak. These lines appear in the poem “A Sandglass”: 

    When someone called someone

    I looked back. 

    Even though someone did not call someone

    I looked back.

   The backwards glance is characteristic of this poet (and many of Sin’s poems are about the poet’s vocation), but it is also characteristic of a person at the end of a love affair. A broken connection makes one more alert to any existing connections—or possibilities for connection— in the larger world. A person who has lost love will often listen for the sound of someone calling and will often look back. 

    Stylistically, although surrealist approaches run through  all the poems collected here, the newer works deploy Sin’s jarring and paradoxically fitting juxtapositions towards a particular end—cutting through the loveliness of individual lines almost compulsively and sometimes literally: 

    The moon rises, and night sparkles at the bottom of a dark well

    that someone threw a sword into. 

    The first line, harkening back to both Joseon- and Romantic-era poetry, evokes the peaceful image of reflected light in still water. The second line shows us instead a glittering sword. Whereas earlier works included discordant reminders of modernity, like a power station appearing in a snowy field, interjections like this one introduce a specific element of violence. (This particular poem ends with a commonly-used bit of corporate-speak that takes on an ominous meaning and some dark humor, given the recent sword: “Let’s try to get along well.”) 

    Knives and other cutting implements appear with greater and greater frequency as the poems move forward, reminding us that violence is always present, perhaps even necessary. In these later poems, Brother Anthony aptly points out that Sin’s strategy of “defamiliarization” seems to be deployed towards a particular aim—what I would call a realist aim. There is in these poems a refusal to create artificially harmonious poetic worlds, an insistence on pointing “with a clear finger” at the here and now, an insistence that we listen to the world’s dissonances. These poems will slap any romantic or Romantic stupor out of our eyes. 

    But all of this is not to suggest that Concealed Words is a grim read. On the contrary, lines like those quoted above flash with wit and liveliness, letting us see the “mischievous smile” Brother Anthony says that the poet often wears. It is invigorating to read these poems. They show us how we might face the difficulties and paradoxes in what we call real life. 

Nadia Kalman

Editor, Words Without Borders Campus (wwb-campus.org) 

Author, The Cosmopolitans (Livingston Press, 2010)