VOL.74/2024.09

 

From a Tiny Room to a Funeral Home,
and to the Heaven of Magma

A Poet’s Pick

 

2024.08.05

 

 

A Western scholar once wrote that language reveals what has been, and what has not been, and above all, what has “ceased” to exist. Here, the language can be the names of those who once existed, or sometimes the sentences left behind in the form of poetry. In this respect, I have long thought of the posthumous poetry collection as a “rusty mirror” in which the departed tried to find and gaze upon their own self-portrait ahead of time.
The poetry of the dead, contemplated in life by those who are no longer with us, is like a letter from the afterlife to the present, before they cross over to the next. Reading a collection of poems left behind is special because they often give us the gift of foreknowledge of death. I bring two posthumous poetry collections to the table side by side. I open Bae Young-Ok’s Lived a Hundred Days Together, Gone a Lifetime (Munhakdongne), a collection of poems I have been reading with great care for five years, and Cha Do-Ha’s Hands of the Future (Spring Days Books), a collection of poems I have recently read in depth.

 

A Girl at the Funeral Parlor

 

 

Poet Bae Young-Ok left this world in 2018. On June 11, 2019, the first year after her death, the collection Lived a Hundred Days Together, Gone a Lifetime was published. It describes how the poet perceived death.

 

 

It seems likely that the poet anticipated and was convinced of her absence in the near future. That’s why this poem, the first in the collection, envisions a “me that does not exist in an eternal world.” The poet is gone, and we, the readers, are left with a lonely collection of poems.
The prophecy that future readers of the collection would transcribe her voice onto paper was also described in the poem. To imagine what the lost poet said and why she said it, the readers must imagine the poet’s abyss hidden behind the visible letters.
Yet the poet’s words are often a doorway to the unknown, forever undecipherable. Reading a poem is an attempt to wander around and open the door to the poet’s room, but no one ever witnesses the world beyond the door. The poet writes that all those who grasp the handle called “language” will be infected by something that comes from that room, though it can never be opened. Perhaps the dead poet is a hermit, sitting in that room, waiting for a visitor: the readers. The poet’s words, “I, the main character,/ will be the only one absent//(...)// I, the main character,/ will be the only one sad (from the poem A Funeral in Later Years),” express the very emotion of the moment when the door is closed.
The main character of a funeral parlor is always the dead, but it is also a space where that character is absent. In Bae Young-Ok’s other poems, however, there is a touch of poignancy, as if she has been to her own “funeral in the future.”

 

 

The poet imagines a tear drop left in front of a funeral home, and a young girl crying in it. The mourners, dressed in black, don’t recognize the girl in the tear. The poet then asks where the girl’s tears are coming from, and what factors are responsible for it.
All humans will, at some point, encounter a place where the “you” are absent. When I read this poetry collection and imagine a festival for “me” without “me,” I envision a time in the distant future when I will be gone. Bae Young-Ok’s poetry collection therefore subtly portrays the faces of those who wander “between distant islands and islands (from the poem Next Time)” after death. They are the faces of all of us, the faces of those of us who will go to those islands in the future.

 

The Heaven’s Magma

 

 

Poet Cha Do-Ha passed away in 2023. Unfortunately, his first collection of poems, published this year, became the poet’s memorial. The first poem in the collection, Immigration Inspection, catches our attention from the title. Immigration, in this poem, is an entry to death. The poet tries to leave his native country (reality) and go to heaven (death).
In the poem, there is a “baby that doesn’t cry,” a “skinny old man” passing by, and a “woman with scattered hair.” They try to leave the place and head for “heaven.” The poet and their departure feel like a separation from their birthplace and liberation from their country and mother tongue. Tragically, the poet also foresees the fate of his poems. Bae Young-Ok’s premonitions and Cha Do-Ha’s premonitions are somehow similar, and I wonder if I’m the only one who finds the resemblance deeply saddening.

 

 

As many readers of Cha Do-Ha’s poems will agree, I think the most painful poem in the collection is Reading, Suspended, which opens with an imagination of “setting fire to the library.” As with all authors, the poet hopes to be remembered for the one book he or she wrote during his or her lifetime, but in this poem, the library, the cradle and tomb of books, is about to close.
If bookshelves were to disappear from the world, the shelter for books would be lost, and the repose of all the souls that had hoped to remain in a book would be impossible. It seems to me that the dark imagination of a lifetime ending in impossibility places both the poet and the readers of the poem in an uneasy state of mind.
The poet’s confession in the following lines reads like a farewell to those he has yet to meet, a goodbye shared with his last breath. It is filled with wistful sentences where you can feel the burning temperature, and find a person trying to oxidize him/herself in it.

 

 

In the poet’s last prose collection, A Man Who Lies in His Diary (Wisdom House), there is this part: “The writings of a dead man are read more scrupulously. Particularly when it comes to his life. When I die, I want people to read my writing roughly as if I were alive. I want them to look forward to my next work. And conversely, when I’m alive, I want people to read my works as carefully as if I were dead. I want them to see what led to this person’s death and what he wrote before he died.”
Reading these sentences, I get to imagine that he, who has already left our side, is still writing somewhere in this world.

 

 

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Written by Kim Yu-Tae (Poet and reporter in the Art & Culture Department at Maeil Business Newspaper)