On the last day of Seoul Publishers Table, I had a chance to meet poet Son Junsu. We were standing in line to order coffee and struck up a conversation.
Later on, back at the book fair, I found him seated at his table behind a vintage typewriter. I asked him to compose a short poem for HRM, whom he had yet to meet. He asked me to provide him three words that he could use as prompts. I mentioned her “soft puffy eyelids” (there’s a special expression for that in Korean: 눈 두 덩이); “New York” and finally “In-between”.
Oddly enough, I felt like I was asking Chat GPT to write a poem for me. But then Junsu paused for a beat, fed a single sheet of hand-made paper through the carrier and started typing the lines of his poem, smoothly and with effortless grace. And the poem itself is ever so disarmingly simple, so charming and tender.
What a gift and what a highlight from the book fair.
And our Gwanghapdan table sold out of just about everything we had 🍻
See you next year!