[New Release] "Master of the Margins, Making the Center of the World Again" - Poet Park Haeram's 'Yeoreumbam Wiwonhoe'

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] The publishing company 'Siinui Il-yoil' has released poet Park Haeram's 'Summer Night Committee' as the first book in the 'Siinui Il-yoil Poetry Collection' series. Park Haeram, who debuted in 1998 through 'Munhak Sasang,' has been well-known since his debut for his sharp observational skills, sudden imagery, and solid descriptive power. He even became the most transcribed poet among literary youths aspiring to be poets. However, critics and the literary circle have been rather harsh in their evaluations of him. His insistence that poets must speak through poetry has made both his life as a poet and his poetry more steadfast. Having deliberately distanced himself from the literary world's social and cultural circles, this might be a consequence he has to bear. Yet, no one dares to underestimate him lightly. He is a master of the margins who competes with the world solely through poetry. He is now consistently turning the margins where he stands into the center of his poetry and the center of this world, proving himself as a poet.

A Stubborn Person Writing 'The Impossibility Affirmed as Ability'

The poetry collection Summer Night Committee is Park Haeram's third collection, published 23 years after his debut. With a unique style that is hard to imitate, the poet builds his own distinctive poetic world through transformations of the concrete and the abstract, offering once again the pinnacle of his poetry in this collection.

Critic Lee Byung-guk, who wrote the commentary for the collection, describes Park Haeram as "a being who continues a life of self-renewal through the practice of filling and emptying." Regarding this collection, he evaluates that the poet "seeks to erase the fear of facing the world through the process of filling and emptying himself and, from that, explores the possibility of a new subjectivity." This definition aligns with Park Haeram's poetic spirit, which acknowledges the futility of poetry yet never abandons it. Like critics Kim Hyun and Maurice Blanchot's logic, he attempts to strip away human oppression through futility and subvert the absolute value of utility by affirming the impossible. Thus, he can boldly be called a 'poet who embodies emptiness.'

So, what does being a poet mean to Park Haeram? In poems such as "North Wall," "Manduu," "The Patience of Onion," and "Hunja, Gangneung," the poet cares for those who exist in the corners of a world forced into rigid frameworks and tailored to fit those frames. Even in a world where one only loses, he offers the possibility and consolation to seek what comes next, emptying beings bound by overwhelming pain at certain moments in life to present a different landscape. It seems he believes this is the role and duty of a poet.

Fled from the east

Became youth

Those who parted from youth all seem like bereaved families

...

Hunja, spring like a Muslim girl

The posters were torn off the campus on the east coast, standing in the central region, wanting to tilt this way or that. Thanks to that, I became a poet and arrived at Hunja, writing a poem about a fox wandering around.

- Excerpt from [Hunja, Gangneung]

The Pathos Behind, The Spectrum of Imagination

The fundamental basis of Park Haeram's poetry lies in pathos. Not worn-out, clich?d emotions, but delicately handling the sorrow arising from his own and others' misfortunes. Beneath this sorrowful pathos lies human compassion and the poet's sense of self-existence. Poetry is essentially an aesthetic act that confronts the alienation between self and world, discovering similarities to fill the gaps and weave a shared identity. Park Haeram finds this shared identity in pathos. He brings life experiences to the forefront, accepting them as empirical truths or imaginative responses, converging them into a collective emotion. Sometimes he loses the world, sometimes youth, and faces the meaninglessness of existence, but while maintaining a certain distance from worldly emotions, he deeply examines the shadows within.

Mom is certainly not any tree

But sometimes she stops by the child, sobbing and comforting

The child likes those sobbing moments

Because they seem like mom

- Excerpt from [Nunchi]

Another charm of the poetry collection Summer Night Committee lies in its wide spectrum of imagination. Poems such as "There Are Fluttering Seeds on the Moon," "Pale Blue Dot," "The Fact of Earth," and "Out of Sleep in a Dream" unfold cosmic imagination mediated by the universe, stars, Earth, and atmosphere, with no gap between reality and imagination. In the smoothly flowing imaginative spaces, readers have the opportunity to freely expand and create fluid places within themselves. This means aesthetic pleasure is maximized.

Moreover, the profound imagination drawn from trivial everyday objects is a rare sight in contemporary poetry. Reading poems like "North Wall" (snail), "Imitation" (tuft of hair), "Manduu" (dumpling), "Trunk," "The Patience of Onion," and "Support of the Hand" (ballpoint pen), Park Haeram escapes from instrumentalized and decorative imagination, making even the most familiar things reveal their hidden facets. His keen sensitivity and deep probing into the unsettled life of a wanderer, the absence of thought and relationships, enrich his poetic world.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.