Ten Favorite Aphorisms About Poetry by Lee Seong-bok
(These are all from Indeterminate Inflorescence: Lectures on Poetry, a collection of 470 aphorisms by the Korean poet and teacher Lee Seong-bok. They were originally transcribed by his students and were recently translated into English by Anton Hur.)
59. I say this often, but a poem is a collection of words that were trying to get away. When you’re joining the next line to the previous one, the new line has to be the same as the old but different. You’ll know what the last line is only when you get there. Like how you’ll know how you die only when you die.
77. Poetry is not emotion or metaphor but pattern. Patterns are retrospective and predictive at the same time. There are no patterns without metaphoric meaning. Patterns both come from and enable metaphor.
112. There isn’t a single thing in the world that isn’t a story about people. Because the very thing that does the seeing, listening, and speaking is people. When seeing something, try to see your object’s shabbiness and futility. Because you yourself are shabby and futile.
194. Poetry is between the image and the message. This can be explained through the principle of the watermill. When the edges turn, the axis rotates. Or it can be compared to the way a rope is twisted. Rubbing straw between the palms creates a rope that keeps rising out perpendicularly. It is circular movement that makes linear movement possible.
199. Poetry tells us that the moment we are most alive is when we are dying—when looking back at life while standing at the edge of the cliff, unable to move forward. Poetry is that last look we take.
306. Begin a poem with a line that doesn’t look like it would ever become a poem at all. Poetry eludes our comprehension no matter how much you write it; only through writing and writing can you strike a line that makes you wonder if you really wrote it. Of course you didn’t write it. The poem wrote it.
337. Watching a Rubik’s cube get solved is like learning how to write a poem. There are six directions: front-back, left-right, and up-down. Normally we turn things in only the single direction we’re used to. Giving up the other five directions.
404. Even when walking with a good friend, it’s hard to walk in step when your rhythms differ. Life and pain must be accepted in their rhythms and sent off in their rhythms. All learning , like surfing, is about learning rhythm.
424. Go all the way past the point of no return. No one can go to the very end, but it’s possible to say who got further than whom. The measure of one’s humanity is decided by how far they go beyond being human.
453. Windows create a this side and a that side, but smashing the window to get to that side also destroys that side. To never be able to touch what is unbearably close, to still feel a thrill from something when thinking of it, to never give it up to simply stay where one is, that, perhaps, is what living poetically means.
— August 26, 2024