2021. 12. 31 | Asia Publishers | 115 x 188mm | 88 pp. | 8,550 KRW
Translation of Hwang Inchan’s 여기까지가 미래입니다 as part of Asia Publisher’s K-Poet Series.
At once, time has stopped and sounds stilled in this space where even the reader feels like they should hold their breath. At this moment, a strange poetic tautness appears, and silence slowly turns into an omen. But this transformation occurs so slowly that upon looking around, the reader finds themselves in the eye of a storm. As if one has become a modern-day human without knowing, as if one has already arrived at the future that used to feel so far off.
– Poet Kang Seong-eun
Someone said poetry is free but what I find there is only confinement and the premonition of confinement. A bird is not free. A bird is only as free as it has been permitted. Just as a cage without the bird is freedom to Gim Choon-soo, poetry’s confinements appear to me as freedom. What we see is not the freedom of poetry but the dream of freedom a poem dreams, and even that we cannot touch or see properly. Poetry that dreams of infinite freedom is beautiful but it is beautiful because it is useless and impossible. Like others, I am drawn to its uselessness.
– Hwang Inchan, excerpt from the Poet’s Note