In his preface to Walking on a Washing Line, Brother Anthony describes your writing method as a “subconscious process” in which you let the poem unfold organically rather than attempting to exercise control over the composition. Why does writing in this way appeal to you?

As Brother Anthony aptly pointed out, my writing is closer to a subconscious process rather than a conscious work. I write poems when unknown words come out of my mouth accidentally and when unknown music flows from my body. That my poems are a little distracted, composed of several whimsical images juxtaposed and also sometimes confusing is because a stranger living inside of me writes them rather than the me who is a professor and mother.

This stranger seems to be a subconscious monster who I’m not aware of. Maybe it’s a primitive impulse. I feel that a stranger who destroys logic and reason dwells inside my body, jumps out accidentally, and write poems as if he or she surfed on the sea of language. That’s why my poems are said to have a heavy sense of breath and an urgent rhythm. A foreign reader who knows the Korean language very well told me one day that in the English translations of my poems one can also feel the same breath and rhythm. Good translation like Brother Anthony’s can transmit not only the meaning of poems but also their breath and music.

In the essay “Why I Write” that prefaces a selection of your work in the anthology Echoing Song: Contemporary Korean Women Poets, you state: “My writing is a rejection of the world of ‘rightness’ and ‘of course.’” It sounds as if you view your writing as a message that is meant to agitate against the worlds of “rightness” and “of course.” Does this mean you view poetry as capable of encouraging social change? In other words, can poetry be effectively political? How so?

Poets should refuse the world of “당연 (rightness)” and “물론 (of course),” because of their avant-garde existence. However, this refusal does not necessarily lead to social change. It is because people think the existing world of “당연 (rightness)” and “물론 (of course)” is better and they decide to stay there. Or it’s because only minorities pay heed to what poets say and agree with them.

A poet is a solitary being who resembles an old and ailing female shaman murmuring incomprehensible words toward the wall. Her words are so isolated from reality that they can’t bring change any time soon. However, a poem can create a crack in the archaic thought of “당연 (rightness)” and “물론 (of course).” But it is a just a small and political trace, if there is any effect at all. What remains to poets are only the melancholies.