Congratulations on the publication of your eighth book of poetry, City Gas (Moonji, 2022). Since your first collection, you’ve consistently published new books with no significant breaks. From a certain angle, it looks as if you’ve never abandoned poetry and poetry has never abandoned you. It even seems like your relationship with poetry has no ups and downs. Have you ever had a slump?

It’s very fortunate if it seems that way. In reality, it’s a frequent experience for me to stop and get stuck because I’m not satisfied with a poem. There are a lot of stops and starts. The only reason it seems like I’m consistently moving forward is that I don’t ever stop for too long. The difficulty of writing poetry comes from the difficulty of innovation. I think poetry has to continuously reinvent itself in terms of content, form, perception, language. With every attempt to innovate, there’s a repeated process of interruptions and advances, and that repetition is how I’ve arrived at the present.

Maybe my first question is related to your routines for writing poetry. Can I ask what your daily schedule is like? How do you balance writing poetry with your everyday life?

I don’t have a fixed pattern. The time I give to poetry and cooking or chores around the house just depends on the day. If my family is out of the house and I don’t have any plans, sometimes I dedicate the whole day to writing. Writing isn’t so much a special type of work that requires specific conditions as it is something that I attempt whenever I can make time during the day, like any other daily task. If I can just close the door and sit at my desk, I try to let myself be absorbed right into it. But of course, just sitting at the desk doesn’t always produce results.

To me, your poems are quiet and constantly changing—sometimes small changes and sometimes big ones. The poem “Herons Play the Heron Game” is the eponymous poem of your second collection. When I first read it, it felt like a declaration that you were throwing your hat into the ring of poetry. I wonder if, at the time, poetry felt like a kind of fun game for you, a game of striking at language. The heron in the poem is a jump-rope, a pit, a throat, and a kidnapping all at the same time—a multiple, simultaneous being. It feels to me like your project at the time was one of releasing words from their birdcages and letting them fly. When you first began writing poetry, for your first and second collections, what joy did you find in writing?

I agree that my poems have constantly changed. And I’ve always written with the hope that change would be not so much a development in a certain direction, but aradiation outward toward reinvention. I’ve often been told that my second book of poetry unfolds like a kind of language game. But I do hope that the game is less “striking at language” and more an attempt to offer support to language’s own autonomy. When we open the “birdcage” of structure and meaning by which language is bound, words can encounter each other indiscriminately and meaninglessly. Deconstructing the mechanical combination of subject and predicate or switching common nouns with abstract nouns, for example, causes words and language to appear in unexpected formation. Words with different associations like jump-rope, pit, throat, and kidnapping all line up shoulder to shoulder. This autonomy of language seems to be joined to the sovereignty of things. “Things” are not objects that act on behalf of the poet’s emotions, but “multiple, simultaneous beings” that can become anything, like the heron. And when things act independently, and language is arbitrary in this way, unfamiliar images and new rhythms emerge as a result.

I think “Teeth Dance” is an extension of that. I can’t move on without discussing your ability to weave crisp, vibrant imagery and fantasy. I especially like the poem “Dinner Table,” the first poem in your second collection. There is a tomato garden growing under the table and “you”—the poem is in the second person—stick your fork into the table and lift it up. It feels like, as the reader is lifting up the table and opening up the tomato garden, we are lifting and opening the first page of the book as well. Inside, it feels like we might find two children under a blanket telling stories late into the night. Your images are eerie and bewitching in that way. What does fantasy mean to you? Tell us about writing images and stories of fantasy that deviate from reality.

“Dinner Table” is in my second collection, but looking back on it, I feel like fantastical scenes really started to take the lead in my third and fourth collections, The Curve of the Red Brick Wall (Minumsa, 2001) and A Cat Watching a Video of a Cat (Moonji, 2004). So “Dinner Table” feels to me like it predicts what will come later. The tomato vines are under the table, and “you” the reader are still sitting and using your fork above the table, which is why you stick your fork into the table and not the tomatoes. I’ll give you an example. In the poem “Cake,” from my third book, there’s a scene where someone puts a candle that is a bomb into a cake and lights it. The cake explodes. Then we sing a song like nothing is happening, slice up the explosion, and eat it. In my fourth book, there is a poem called “Dog Food.” It starts with a dog on a leash licking its bowl. Then the dog licks its own face with its long tongue, and it licks the face of the speaker who is holding the leash and moves on. To me, fantasy is not about creating something totally new that doesn’t exist in reality. Instead, it means capturing a scene that breaks out of the established relationships or positions of humans and things. Maybe this is meaningful because fantasy collapses our automatic perspectives and consciousness and makes us see unfamiliar aspects of the world and things. I think my poems achieve fantasy by changing our ways of seeing just slightly.

If the poems we’ve talked about so far are intense and provocative, a poem like “The Left Rain Falls, the Right Rain Doesn’t” feels like it contains a puddle filling with rain and passing on. This poem is famous for being misread in a pleasant way. Many readers thought it was about getting wet in the rain while holding an umbrella for someone else. I’ve seen you mention that you enjoy that kind of misreading. But I wonder what kind of image and situation you were thinking of as you originally wrote the poem.

I remember thinking of it as a poem expressing the divisions and imbalances in our lives. In the poem, we see two people walking along. People are easily split into two (or even more) persons, right? Isn’t that similar to the line “my hand was divided into two”? I’m not sure why, but to me that division feels less like comfort and more like imbalance. The appearance of two people, of them walking hand in hand, of their footsteps and bodies—to me it all looks like the emergence of imbalance itself. Where is there balance in our lives? Then when it rains, the rain joins this imbalance. The rain falling on the left goes hand in hand with the rain not falling on the right. I think that sense of tilting and imbalance is constructed through several imagesin the poem. I really care about the scissors, footsteps, buttons, and bodies as the objet presented in the poem. If you take a walk on a rainy day, you can usually see little items like that lying on the street and getting wet. Whenever I see that, I feel a powerful sadness from these objects that have been forced out of somewhere to wander in the rain, unable to find their proper place or appropriate balance.

To add to that, would you mind commenting on the joyful misreading of the poem as well?

I’ve heard this poem has also been read as depicting two lovers walking hand in hand under the same umbrella. Rain only falls on one side for each person because their shoulders won’t fit under the umbrella. It was interesting to hear that. I wrote the poem about division, but this interpretation adds an umbrella into the poem and reads harmony and consideration into it. It was totally unexpected to see my poem’s coldness return as this warm misreading, but I think that’s the nature of poetry. It reminds me that poems go beyond the poet’s intentions, and always contain more directions than expected. That’s why poetry belongs to the reader, and that’s what makes poetry amazing and powerful.

The speaker of “Tree’s Rotation” says, “like a captive stone / I had no opinion.” It seems to me that this is the attitude of the speaker of your poems—to be without opinion, like a stone. The speaker is always one step removed from argument or explanation. In an interview with YES24, you’ve said, “Poetry has no perspective. Poetry is something like a ripple produced by contact with the world.” In your poems, it seems like there is almost no desire to speak about the self. So your poetry feels somehow detached at times. You’ve mentioned in your essay collection I Saw Chilsung Supermarket (Achimdal, 2022) that you have no interest in talking about yourself. I wonder if one reason you enjoy writing poetry is that it can make the self unimportant or create distance from the self. Have you ever wanted to reveal your self in your poems? How do you maintain distance between poetry and the self?

Of course, it’s certainly possible for a poet to write poetry with a perspective or opinion. And poets can express their emotions as well. However, that seems to make the poet larger than the poems and make the poems relatively small and slanted to one side. And then, the world doesn’t have to conform to the emotions the poet expresses. In fact, doesn’t a poet have to avoid getting caught up in individual conditions, surroundings, emotions, and perspectives in order to freely say what they really want to say? I like to be liberated from thought. I feel much freer when I have no thoughts than when I express my thoughts. In my poems, rather than speak myself, I attempt to walk into the infinity of the object and the world. That’s the reason why I do that. When I cease judgment and don’t express myself, when I open myself to the outside, I feel like I am nowhere and everywhere at once.

Next I want to ask about poet Lee Sumyeong as a person. You have many social roles, as a poet, researcher, critic, and so on. I admire your ability to perform all these roles faithfully. I wonder if this is possible because your poetry and life are not really separate, and because all of these things are somewhat connected. How does your poetry affect your life, and your life, poetry?

They seem connected somewhere, but I’m not really sure how. Of course when I give a lecture or write criticism, I sometimes discover the identity of some complex thought I have about poetry, but those observations don’t seem to have a particular effect on me when I’m writing poetry. What kind of person I am, what kind of life I lead, and who I spend time with is important to my life, but when I write poetry, there is some other possibility or potential operating beyond that self, so it’s difficult to connect my life and poetry directly. I think it may be because, for me, poetry does not proceed so much from a connection to my own life as from contact with the material world at the present moment and location.

I feel like one of the biggest changes in your poetry occurred in your collection Distribution Warehouse (Moonji, 2018). Here it feels as if you’re serving up reality on a dish like slices of hoe [raw fish]. If I were to venture a cautious guess, I would say it’s because the primary driver of your poems seems to have shifted from imagination to observation. The power of observation striking at objects can be felt in the transparent scenes of everyday life you observe. In the poem “Ediya Coffee” a man in a white shirt shouts, “Do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m saying?” Bugs ruin the streetlights, and a drunk old woman tells someone to bring more alcohol. These are the kinds of common scenes that we can see around us all the time. These various patches of cloth come together to complete a single quilt. Following those scenes are the heavy lines, “Everyone bounced out of / Death /Once more / And started pummeling death with whatever they could find.” The poetic speaker who used to create worlds is now an observer quietly watching what’s happening around them. Is there some external or internal reason for this change?

I’ve received a lot of opinions on the change that can be seen in Distribution Warehouse, which is my seventh book of poetry. I agree with your point about moving from imagination to observation. Attempting to bring individual scenes from this world onto the page in detail, just as they are, is certainly one aspect of it. But I actually don’t think that imagination and observation are that far removed from each other, because it’s not rare in poetry to observe through imagination or imagine through observation. Are ultra-fine descriptions observations, or are they imagined? For my part, even when I’m writing fantasy poems, I still try to describe things meticulously, as if I can see them right in front of me. The poems in Distribution Warehouse try to describe real items and people, like so many “slices of hoe,” existing only in the form of storage and accumulation within the symbolic space of the warehouse. Where the operation of time seems to have disappeared, there is the reality of inaction—the reality that literature doesn’t pay attention to because it’s too meaningless. The man yelling into his phone, and the drunk woman—their shouts and drunken language—are therefore a reality outside of literature, a reality difficult to capture in literature. This is because language in raw form, like “Do you hear me?” and “Bring more alcohol,” belongs so much to the everyday that it’s difficult for literature to approach. I think attempts to carry such things intact into the field of literature destroy literature’s established form and inertia, producing innovation. I hope that the change in Distribution Warehouse is less about a shift from imagination to observation, and closer to a new attempt at that kind of innovation. Innovation through a shift from supposedly “poetic” things to everyday life itself.

For the past few years, it seems like you’ve been fixated on warehouses and city gas. I think these unremarkable words suit your poetry well. Your collections Distribution Warehouse and City Gas both contain multiple poems titled “Distribution Warehouse” and “City Gas.” The world of city gas and warehouses in these poems, all with the same title and without even identifying numbers, strikes me as a world of forgetting. The poems all have the same title, but they don’t coalesce or link to each other, like individual, falling raindrops. It’s similar to the poem “Unauthorized Absence,” where the speaker says, “I stick one tile on, and the other falls off, and I stick it back in place, / And the first one falls off / This strange tiling.” In your essay collection I SawC hilsung Supermarket, you write, “I’m not sure how I started writing poems with the same title. I’m not really attracted to serial poems. I’m actually exhausted by conventional serial poems that have the same title followed by a number. That’s why I didn’t put numbers on ‘Distribution Warehouse.’ I don’t even think of them as a series—maybe because they have no numbers. The repetition of ‘Distribution Warehouse’ is just an overlap that’s hard to explain, and the only thing clear to me is that I started writing these poems with the same title purely because of the power of the first ‘Distribution Warehouse.’” Could you tell us more about how you came to repeatedly write these poems with the same title?

In Distribution Warehouse, there are ten poems titled “Distribution Warehouse,” and in City Gas, which was published this year, there are six poems titled “City Gas.” City Gas encompasses the world of Distribution Warehouse, while also diversifying and expanding it. As a result, poems titled “Distribution Warehouse” appear againin City Gas. So city gas and distribution warehouses keep disappearing and reappearing across the two collections. The reason I don’t number the poems is partially that I don’t like creating order. But more importantly, I like the feeling of writing a poem for the first time each time, and that’s the only way I can write. Writing multiple poems with the same title means staying with that title for a long time. In the sense that warehouses store different items and gas provides hot water and heating, they are a kind of basic, essential infrastructure for our lives—they’re similar. More than anything, they’re similar in that it’s awkward and uncomfortable to see them in literature because they overwhelmingly belong to the realm of life. But this insertion, this invasion of distribution warehouses and city gas into literature is interesting to me, and the power of these images that refuse to assimilate to literature allowed me to write multiple poems about them.

Before I bring the interview to a close, I want to finish with my own intentional misreading. While I was reading “City Gas,” I accidentally started reading the word “gas” as “poetry”:

There is poetry. Poetry is available to us. Poetry has no color, no smell, no weight. Poetry makes no sound, it’s invisible. But poetry is soft, and poetry is mild, and poetry flows to us subtly and gently, and poetry caresses us, and our thoughts are filled with poetry. The poetry supply expanded nationwide. So // There’s no need for walks.

    I want to give you this poem as a gift . . . I feel like, at some point, your poetry has become something like city gas to meand your many readers.

On the one hand, gas structures our lives and is extremely familiar to us, but on the other hand, it has no sound, color, or shape. It is an element of our lives, and yet the shadow of death looms over it as well. It helps us, but it’s also dangerous. The line “Gas is available to us” suggests these two opposing images. Gas contains an element of danger, yet it paradoxically feels soft and mild. It seems natural to me to transpose this pharmakon of gas onto the pharmakon of poetry. Poetry is warm and mild, but it’s also cold and leaves us standing in the empty wilderness. Thank you for reading that element into my poetry.

Okay, this is really my final question. What place do you love most in the world? Where are you most happy?

When I sit down at the table to write poetry, wherever I am, I am happy.

Translated by Seth Chandler

KOREAN WORKS MENTIONED:

• City Gas (Moonji, 2022)

  『도시 가스』 (문학과지성사, 2022)

• Herons Play the Heron Game (Segyesa, 1998)

• The Curve of the Red Brick Wall (Minumsa, 2001)

• A Cat Watching a Video of a Cat (Moonji, 2004)

『고양이 비디오를 보는 고양이』 (문학과지성사, 2004)

• I Saw Chilsung Supermarket (Achimdal, 2022)

• Distribution Warehouse (Moonji, 2018)