By Ame Ai

The Postman…no, that is not an action movie starring Kevin Costner, it is a book and a poem by Mun Dok-su. The Postman is unlike any other Korean poem that I have seen. The Postman is post-war, post Postmodernism (for the author), and almost post-life (as the author is already in the winter of his life).

It is is what one considers an epic poem. However, I would not compare it as much to Homer’s Odyssey as I would compare it to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. First, the poem itself seems to be divided into chapters, six in all, or seven if you include the preface, which is not normally written as a poem. Second, the controversial nature of the poem lends itself to such a comparison. If it were made into a movie then it may get an R or PG-13 rating due to violence and obscenities or else be subject to censorship. Third, the poem is heavily masculine as it focuses on soldiers more than on the women who stayed home. This is not to say that there are no mentions of women, mothers or grandmothers, or even feminine images of birth and life through eggs (seeds) or flowers (e.g. camellias), for there are, but they are not as often prominent. Fourth, he makes intellectual leaps with his graphic, descriptive metaphors (e.g., he compares Joseph Roulin’s golden buttons to bursting bullets), making this poem much more poetic like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (which was also more than 400 lines long) than Geoffrey Chaucer’s storytelling prose in Beowulf. Ironically though, he does make mention of Homer’s Oedipus in chapter 3, “Token of Fire,” as if to argue my point that this was not like a Homer poem.

The Korean people seem sometimes to be obsessed with reunions. There are the reunions between long lost family members as is the case with adoptees and birth families. Then there is the reunion between the North and the South. Korea is the only country nowadays that is still torn apart from war. The symbol of this division is the DMZ, and the DMZ plays prominently in the artwork and poem of The Postman. Mun Dok-su lets the idea of reunification dance around the poem like a butterfly with lines such as “with your two down-folded fingertips you united two worlds.”

The Postman compares the image from that of Van Gogh’s “Postman Joseph Roulin” to that of a military man. Unlike the theme of reunification, military images play an even heavier role in the poem as there are often mentions of guns and ammunitions, “105 or 155mm field guns,” “122mm or 152 mm medium and heavy guns,” “120mm mortars,” bayonets, machine guns, submachine guns, and M1s. In addition, Mun Dok-su uses onomatopoeia when he writes, “ahh, ayayai, uck, uck, ummm, unggg,” to describe noises people made in pain, and “ratatat tatatata takatak takatak” to describe noises made by guns. The more descriptive he is, the more gruesome his poem seems to get, putting the reader at the heart of the scene.

Mun Dok-su uses famous images (e.g., a lotus flower, the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Olives, the Valley of Death) and phrases from various religions (e.g., Confucianism, Christianity, and Buddhism) to emphasize his points. For example, he says, “Eli Eli lama sabchthani,” or “Father, Father, why have you forsaken me?” multiple times throughout the poem so that the reader can feel the suffering of the soldiers. He also references the Bible multiple times with the well-known scripture verse: “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone.” He does this first in the preface and last in the chapter 6, “Now, Here.” In chapter 5, “Moderato,” Mun Dok-su begins, “Confucius is turning cartwheels round a toy tree, grumbling to himself/Jesus rides a young donkey without any saddle, hanging on with the tips of his toes/Buddha sits cross-legged under a bodhi tree, opening and closing his eyes” to emphasize someone (perhaps the reader?) “still dabbling in mud, born two months premature.” He even casually references atheism and polytheism when he says, “Don’t say recklessly that you could see no god. (‘g’ or ‘G’?)” and “No Zeus here.”

His reason for all these religious references should be clear: he is delivering a message to the world. Hence, the title. Lee Tae-dong says it best, “If he says that discovering and delivering the message entrusted by God is so arduous and difficult, that is not limited to such considerations. It is not simply like the effort required of the female Korea weightlifting champion Chang Mi-Ran in order to lift 186 kilograms, it requires the endurance of a Buddha sitting in the lotus position and attaining enlightenment” (38). Oh Se-Young interprets the poem another way: “What the poet sees from the two holy beings—that is, godly humans—is not the Providence of the heaven or a world of the transcendental laws but the importance (or the ‘truth’) of the earth that they tread on” (45). What does it mean then that his letters were destroyed? The messages were important, yes, but the most important message does not need to be conveyed through letters; it can be conveyed through love. And, indeed, the message is love. The satchel (the egg) he was carrying contained love letters.

The complexity of the poem is such that it requires pages of endnotes and two commentaries by Lee Tae-Dong and Oh Se-Young, each commentary having his own biography. This is a poem that one could read time and time again, analyzing it inside or outside of a classroom, and always find something new. My analysis is only one among many.

Mun Dok-su is a well-respected poet, a former president of Korea PEN, and the former executive chair of the 12^th World Congress of Poets in Seoul. He has worked with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, a famous Beat poet, and other internationally famed poets. Mun Dok-su is a man who deserves essentially three biographies, one in the beginning (Foreword), one in the middle (as the poem is based on his actual life experiences), and one at the end (Personal History). It is as if his own book bows to him to be a role model for the reader. We should all bow to him for creating this masterpiece.

Mun, Dok-su. The Postman. Trans. Brother Antony of Taizé. Poetic Matrix Press: Madera, California, 2010.