Reading Korean Poetry Through Music

Reading poetry in translation often heightens awareness of what can’t quite be explained such as rhythm, tone, atmosphere, the way a poem feels as much as what it says. These are things we register in our bodies before we put words to them. Music offers one way in: not as an analogy or backdrop, but as another art form shaped by shared histories, moods, and formal instincts.

This listening and reading project pairs eight contemporary Korean poetry collections with Korean music chosen by the poets and translators themselves. All of the books were published in English translation in the United States between 2023 and 2025. The music selections span decades and genres, from 1960s folk to indie rock, disco, hip hop, and K-pop. Each pairing is accompanied by short reflections from the poet and translator, describing connections that are intuitive and intimate. Some pairings move through nostalgia or political memory; others through texture, wordplay, or a lingering feeling.

Together, these book and album pairings approach familiar emotional, social, and political terrain through sensibilities that may feel slightly off-kilter or resistant to easy meaning. What comes through is not a single idea of what contemporary Korean poetry is, but a range of tones—muted, playful, mournful, restrained, unruly—that sit apart from the polished image of South Korean popular culture often grouped under the label “K-culture.”

We hope this project invites you to linger, to follow your curiosity, and to find your own way into these poems across sound, language, and eras.

Note: This was a collaborative project between South Korean poet and playwright Yoo Heekyung who runs poetry bookshop wit n cynical in Seoul and Korean diaspora poet-translator Stine An based in NYC. They leveraged their respective literary networks to collect pairings (poet Yoo from South Korean poets and Stine from literary translators) as a way to draw attention to the relationality and collaboration inherent to literature and literary translation.

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Ha Jaeyoun, Radio Days, translated by Sue Hyon Bae

Album pairing (poet)

Eoddeonnal (One Day) 1st: 1960.1965
Artist: Eoddeonnal (One Day) 어떤날
Genre: Folk Pop, Year: 1986
Track: “A Sunday Made Only of Afternoons”

There was a time when I drifted through the poetic spaces of this collection, immersed in a feeling that echoed the song lyrics from this album: “I wanted to float away like a yellow balloon,” “I walked endlessly into the dark.” I imagine a Sunday when the track “A Sunday Made Only of Afternoons” plays from across the room, from your radio speaker and from mine, at the same moment. –Ha Jaeyoun

Album pairing (translator)

Kim Min-gi
Artist: Kim Min-gi
Genre: Folk, Year: 1971
Track: “Friend”

Radio Days has a lot of nostalgia. For me, nostalgia in South Korea is embodied by the folk singer-songwriter Kim Min-gi. This album especially is tied up with South Korea’s history of political oppression and Kim Min-gi‘s personal suffering as a consequence of his music becoming associated with the activist movement. I started translating Radio Days in 2016, the same year as the mass protests against Park Geun-hye, and one of my most emotional memories from that time is Yang Hee-eun singing Kim Min-gi’s “아침 이슬(Morning Dew)” to a crowd of millions. From “Friend”: 저 멀리 들리는 친구의 음성/ 달리는 기차 바퀴가 대답하려나(“My friend‘s voice from far away / Will the spinning train wheels reply”). –Sue Hyon Bae

Lee Sumyeong, Just Like, translated by Colin Leemarshall

Album pairing (poet)

NewJeans
Artist: NewJeans
Genre: K-pop, Year: 2022
Track: “Cookie”

I want to connect Just Like with NewJeans’ track “Cookie” from their debut. “The cookie I made… is only at my house, come over.” I’m curious about this cookie that exists only there. Why can’t it be taken outside? While writing these poems, I wrote about what could not be taken out and what could, but the starting point was always what can’t be brought out. Just Like begins from there. –Lee Sumyeong

Album pairing (translator)

Promised Land
Artist: Kim Doo Soo
Genre: Psychedelic Folk, Year: 1988
Track: “Tree Frog Su-Hee”

I have yet to encounter any music (Korean or otherwise) that is quite analogous to Lee Sumyeong’s poetry. That said, Kim Doo Soo‘s song “Tree Frog Su-Hee” immediately sprang to mind when I was asked to think of an appropriate pairing with Lee’s Just Like. Appearing on Kim Doo Soo’s 1988 album Promised Land, the song is built around an unpredictable series of arpeggios. Like Lee’s strange syntagms, these arpeggios at first suggest a familiar idiom—only for them to defect from expectation with each new turn. –Colin Leemarshall

Shin Hae-uk, Biologicity, translated by Spencer Lee-Lenfield

Album pairing (poet)

slow diving table
Artist: Sogyumo Acacia Band
Genre: Dream pop, Year: 2013
Track: “Path of Dreams”

I listened to this album that night I wanted to hear water melting into water. I hope Biologicity might keep you company on nights you want to read patterns of water melting into water. –Shin Hae-uk

Album pairing (translator)

Goodbye, Grief
Artist: Jaurim
Genre: Alternative rock, Year: 2013
Track: “Twenty-Five, Twenty-One”

The TV show named after this song came out just as I was starting to send poems from Shin Hae-uk’s collection to journals. Both the lyrics’ stance of looking back at a complicated past relationship, as well as lead singer Kim Yuna’s ability to transform the simplest of words with her seismic, pansori-like roar, made me think of Shin’s poetry, especially her poem “Hands.” –Spencer Lee-Lenfield

Lee Jenny, Pirowa Padowa, translated by Archana Madhavan

Album pairing (poet)

Don’t You Worry Baby (I’m Only Swimming)
Artist: The Black Skirts
Genre: Indie rock, Year: 2011
Track: “Parrot”

The song “Parrot” by The Black Skirts is about a soul adrift, with no hope in sight. How charming and beautifully comforting is the presence of this “short-haired parrot that whispers, even if not the right words” on the shoulder of this lonely individual. The “short-haired parrot” in this song perfectly resembles the linguistic sentiment of my poetry collection Pirowa Padowa, making it a song I deeply cherish. –Lee Jenny

Album pairing (translator)

Layer
Artist: Room306
Genre: Indie pop, Year: 2018
Track: “Further”

The song “Further” by Room306 reminds me of how, while translating Pirowa Padowa, I often thought about the space between Korean and English, and the many layers of meaning a single word can carry. The album as a whole reminds me of the meditative, hypnotic sonic quality many of the poems in this collection carry. I’ve lost myself in this album countless times, just as easily as I’ve lost myself in the melancholic world of Pirowa Padowa. –Archana Madhavan

Yoo Heekyung, Today’s Morning Vocabulary, translated by Stine An

Album pairing (poet)

Separation Anxiety
Artist: Nell
Genre: Alternative rock, Year: 2008
Track: “Separation Anxiety”

There was a time when it hurt because I couldn’t escape, when I wanted to hide because I was afraid I couldn’t find my way out. Back then, poetry was all I had. Urgent feelings, written in sparse letters—language that cannot be erased and will never disappear: sensation, substance, idea, universe. In the end, it was myself. The three members of Nell are the same age as me. Their music and my poems from this collection share the same frequency. That difficult-to-explain sensibility is, to me, our shared contemporaneity.  –Yoo Heekyung

Album pairing (translator)

Legend
Artist: Jannabi
Genre: Indie rock, Year: 2019
Track: “dreams, books, power and walls”

I chose to pair Today’s Morning Vocabulary with Jannabi’s Legend for the album’s lush, retro sound and shared attention to youth, longing, and the emotional life of literature. The track “dreams, books, power and walls” captures perfectly the hopeful melancholy that threads the poems of Yoo’s debut poetry collection. Poems about encountering the inevitable losses from childhood into young adulthood, like little songs you sing from your small room, a mournful music that might just sound like noise to someone else until they put their ear against the walls and lean in to listen. –Stine An

Seo Jung Hak, The Cheapest France in Town, translated by Megan Sungyoon

Album pairing (poet)

Sanullim Vol. 1: ​​Already Now
Artist: Sanullim
Genre: Psychedelic rock, Year: 1977
Track: “Already Now”

It was probably late summer, though not exactly. I felt as if I were floating on clouds. “Already now—has the sun risen?” Time, really, I didn’t notice it passing. Ah, yes, so that’s how it goes. –Seo Jung Hak

Album pairing (translator)

The Stranger
Artist: E Sens
Genre: Hip hop, Year: 2019
Track: “Clock (feat. Kim Ximya)”

If all the poems in The Cheapest France in Town were stacked together, their shadow might look a lot like The Stranger by E Sens—a portrait of someone deeply disappointed and irretrievably disoriented by hypocrisies in the world. While E Sens’s viscerally confessional tone veers significantly from Seo Jung Hak’s enigmatic satire, the two collections bear surprising similarities in sentiment, aptly summed up by this line from “Clock (feat. Kim Ximya)”: “서로 먼 데 앉아 쳐다보기만 한 세상과 나” (Sitting far apart, the world and I only looked at each other). –Megan Sungyoon

Oh Eun, From Being to Being, translated by Shyun Ahn

Album pairing (poet)

Do It
Artist: Stray Kids
Genre: K-pop, Year: 2025
Track: “Do It”

What matters most in wordplay is the impulse to play fully. You add, subtract, multiply, and divide to find what is distinctly yours. In From Being to Being, this discovery unfolds as a linguistic adventure. In “Do It,” reggaeton and Korean traditional music intermix freely. What remains after the rush fades—that residual feeling from play—is what allows poetry to begin again. Writing poetry, after all, is “a fight we can’t lose” because “I do what I want.” Play has no winner. –Oh Eun

Album pairing (translator)

Aliens
Artist: Sultan of the Disco
Genre: Disco/Funk, Year: 2018
Track: “Aliens”

I’d love to pair Aliens by Sultan of the Disco with Oh Eun’s From Being to Being. The groove in Aliens is lively and inventive, constantly shifting melodies, rhythms, and even styles. Moreover, the themes and lyrics of the album are full of humor and irony, yet they do not sound forced. The collection’s balance between playfulness and restraint reminds me of Oh’s wordplay in the collection. –Shyun Ahn

Lee Min-ha, Phantom Limbs, translated by Jein Han

Album pairing (poet)

Non-linear
Artist: Mot
Genre: Indie rock, Year: 2004
Track: “Cold Blood”

We keep circling within tangled, bent time. Like the mannequins in Phantom Limbs, Mot’s “Cold Blood” captures the extreme bodily sensation of a form desperately trying to escape from the endless memories of an already-severed future. –Lee Min-ha

Album pairing (translator)

Dreamtalk
Artist: 3rd Line Butterfly
Genre: Psychedelic rock, Year: 2012
Track: “Smoke Hot Coffee Refill”

The album opens with a hypnotic incantation (“Smoke Hot Coffee Refill”) and closes with a game of word chain that surprises you at every turn (“Alpha-Bits“). Scattered in between are surreal songs driven by dream logic (“Into a Dream“) and cheeky rhymes (“Utterly Sexy“). I can’t think of a better spiritual twin to Lee Min-ha’s Phantom Limbs. –Jein Han

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Today’s Morning Vocabulary by Yoo Heekyung (translated by Stine An) is available via Zephyr Press.