[One Sip of a Book] Poet Kim Su-young's 'Poem, Spit'

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of the book itself, while others instantly reach the reader's heart, creating a point of contact with the book. We introduce such meaningful sentences excerpted from the book. - Editor's note

This is a collection of prose that compiles only Kim Su-young's essays on poetry theory and literary criticism. It vividly shows the history of fierce struggles over what freedom defined amidst the chaos of 20th-century history, politics, culture, and literature, and what kind of battles he fought to express that freedom through his own aesthetics.

For some reason, there seems to be a tendency in recent journalism to overestimate such past melancholy as a unique characteristic of our nation. According to publishers, readers these days tend to seek many research books about Korea, and perhaps riding on this trend, we often see theories that distort and misinterpret under the name of national characteristics. The interpretation of melancholy is one of them. I recently read an article written by a reporter who had been to the Berlin Film Festival, where people there were surprised and asked, "Why do Koreans cry so much?" I sympathized and thought the same after reading the article, but this is the fault of low-quality filmmakers who fell into the mannerism of melancholy, not a fault of our reality.

Loneliness or despair cannot be controlled at will. Even if life does not allow loneliness or despair, if that is the reality I face today, I believe quietly accepting it is rather pure and manly. From this perspective, I learn to enjoy my life and love people.

Poetry, Spit on It | Kim Su-young & Lee Young-jun (Editors) | Minumsa | 300 pages | 14,000 KRW

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