Voice of Korea

/ Culture - Life

Worker-Poet

"Tonghaengja (Companion)" run by the Central Committee of the Writers Union of Korea is one of the popular homepages in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Those who love literature and hope to create literary works are learning literature through the homepage.
Worker Han Ji Song at the Pyongyang Municipal Commission of Science and Technology is a regular subscriber to it.
He was very fond of literature during his middle school days and continued to write poems while working.
When he started to work at the Pothonggang Footwear Factory, he wrote poems reflecting the worthwhile working life in succession, including the lyric "My Love and My Workplace" and the stanzaed poem "Diary I Wrote in Workplace".
Han Ji Song said:
"I was so excited by the thrilling life in reality that I used to write down what I felt. Though my writings were not so good, they were published and I was very proud of it. They can be called my wealth. I began to write poems with great interest and now I have written tens of them.
Poem means my life. Without writing a poem, I feel something lacking in my life. So I keep writing poems."
Han Ji Song became an amateur writer. He wrote many works under the guidance of full-time writers. And he took the short course for amateur writers held every year, steadily improving his creative skills.
In particular, he created the lyric "My Home Address" in 2024, which was highly estimated at the national prize lyric contest for celebrating the 76th founding anniversary of the DPRK.

"I was greatly moved to watch the documentary showing that the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un went out to an airfield for the flood victims, called at their tents and invited them to Pyongyang, bestowing warm love and benevolence on them. So I thought I should write a poem on his love unconditionally as an amateur writer and buckled down to its creation.
It was not easy to write the poem. But his love for the people gave me so strong an impulse that it became the seed of the poem and its lines and verses."
In the poem, Han Ji Song gave a lifelike and truthful picture of Kim Jong Un's magnanimous and meticulous love for the people and their children suffering from flood damage. Therefore, he was favourably noticed as a promising creator of mass literature.
"This time I wrote the lyric 'My Home Address'. But there are many better materials in our reality.
New houses were built in the area cleared of flood damage under the care of our Party and a sea of greenhouses will appear there. They are materials for poems, I think."
It is the reality of socialist Korea that ordinary workers and farmers grow to be good poets if they have talents. That is why songs of beautiful and good life are resounding far and wide on this land.