By Jonathan Chan

Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a Poetry Class
Lee Seong-bok, translated by Anton Hur
Allen Lane (2024) / 176 pages / SGD 29.98

Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a Poetry Class (2023), a collection of aphorisms from the lectures of renowned Korean poet Lee Seong-bok, is one of the most recent books translated by Anton Hur from Korean into English. As explained at the beginning of the book, inflorescence (Hur's rendering of the Sino-Korean word hwaseo) refers to "the order in which flowers bloom on a step", rendered alternatively in 'pure Korean', or Korean without classical Chinese provenance, as a "flower-sequence (kkotcharae)". An indeterminate inflorescence (muhan hwaseo, in Lee's Korean title) refers to flowers that bloom from bottom to top with unlimited growth, as opposed to flowers blooming from top to bottom in a limited manner, a determinate inflorescence. The book's title proceeds from an aphoristic meditation on poetry's capacity to flourish. In aphorism 0, the book's first, Lee states:

We might say poems bloom in "indeterminate inflorescence" as they grow from concrete to abstract, from secular to sacred. Poetry takes its form in its endless failure to express what language cannot.

Hur's decision to translate and pitch Lee's aphorisms suggests a growing interest in a broader variety of Korean literature in translation. In his workshop on 'Pitching Translations' at the recent Singapore Writers Festival, he spoke persuasively about a translator being a book's best friend, having the responsibility to enthuse about it to an editor to the point that it might feel like they've already read the book. Hur is perhaps less known as a translator of poetry and related material from Korean to English. Previous authors he has worked with include the short-story fictionist Bora Chung and the memoirist Baek Sehee. Lee, by contrast, is of a different generation from Chung, born in 1976, and Baek, born in 1990. Born in 1952, Lee is the well-respected author of eight poetry collections as well as works of academic and popular literary criticism, craft and creative writing, and essays on photography. Hur's interest in translating Lee is connected to his love for contemporary Korean poetry, a break from pre-modern Korean poetry in its encounters with European, rather than classical Chinese or Japanese, influence. Korea's contemporary poets are more likely to be influenced by Paul Celan or René Char than their contemporaries in East Asia, and Lee is no exception.

Indeterminate Inflorescence is fundamentally a book about craft. Each of Lee's aphorisms distils his reflections on poetry. The aphorism, as a literary genre, can seem antiquated, consigned to the realm of ancient literatures, such as the aphorisms in the Bible or Buddhist sutras, or of the Platonic or Confucian variety. That the book is a compilation by Lee's students strengthens the impression of an almost sagely figure, sayings dutifully noted down to be propagated among fellow students of poetry. Born in 1952, Lee was trained in French literature at Seoul National University. Lee has long taught French literature at Keimyung University in Daegu, though he also spent time in Paris studying poststructuralism and Seon Buddhism, a Korean branch of Mahayana Buddhism similar to the Chan and Zen traditions in its emphasis on meditation and experiences of sudden enlightenment. These intellectual, literary and spiritual scaffolds undergird both Lee's poems and aphorisms.

What is intriguing about Lee's aphorisms is the way they refuse the task of prescriptive definition. Lee's prefer to describe both poetry and the process of writing it through metaphor. The description of some of these aphorisms as koans can seem apt, not least when occasional moments of apparent bluntness or contradiction can force re-examination of what is meant by poetry altogether. They are divided into five sections: 'Language', 'Object', 'Poetry', 'Writing' and 'Life'.

One of Lee's chief objectives is in encouraging students to overcome any intellectual hurdles or inertia and throw themselves into the act of writing poetry. In aphorism 19 he states:

You must pluck the poem from yourself as quickly as possible. If you're thinking about the poem, it's already too late. Make sure you expel the words faster than you can think about them. Don't let your brain interfere. The stronger the poem's rhythm, the weaker its "meaning". A good sign that your brain is going faster than your body.

There is a shade of automatic writing, or even the spontaneous prose of Jack Keruoac, present in Lee's statement. Lee privileges the subconscious and the ordinary in writing poetry. He also encourages a reliance on sound. Bearing in mind the paralysing effects of influence or ambition, Lee seems to try to disabuse his students of the mental fixations that can stymy the writing of poetry. "A poem is like a finger that breaks out of your head," he writes in aphorism 20. Or right after in 21:

Words dragged by force from the brain are stiff and devoid of feeling. Instead, your words should be a beat ahead of your brain. Like a child rolling a steel hoop, the words will come alive only if they roll on ahead of the brain.

Or in aphorism 104, which counsels against forcing poems into being:

When you write a poem, don't drag it from the front but push it from the back. It's this assuming of the passive position that's the hardest and most important issue at hand. Only the strongest poet has the ability to be passive.

Lee emphasises the vivacity and dynamism of language. He prefers the interesting and surprising connections that can be forged as a poet gives way to process. "The process itself is the goal, and the ending is simply the moment it stops," he states in aphorism 174, likening writing poetry to "a flower bud blooming or a balloon expanding." A sclerotic poetry is a poetry that emerges primarily from the crucible of the intellect, bereft of the viscera of affect. Or take, for instance, aphorism 31:

The first line of a poem is like the trigger of a gun. The next line follows it automatically, and the next after that. You do not speak words, instead you listen to the sound words make. Words and lines, like beasts, have mouths and tails. Each word or line has its tail in the mouth of the next one that follows it out into the world.

The mixing of metaphors in Lee's mind does not yield the dilution of metaphor. Sheer satisfaction can emerge from how a first line of a poem hits a reader with the force of a trigger being pulled. That the aural quality of the line is privileged in poetry is a fundamental distinction from prose or other forms of writing. The image of the beasts, fixed to one another by jaws gripping tails, is a vivid one, creating a sense of both the violence and the doggedness that are central to a poem's integrity in Lee's mind. Or as he illustrates in aphorism 74:

You've seen slow-motion videos of a boxer's face being crumpled by a punch. That's the best feeling. Or videos where a ball warps against a bat… If you can get your words to recreate that feeling, you can die and go to heaven right away.

These are the stakes of writing poetry. This is the transcendence that comes by taking as much pain as possible to craft one's lines: the catharsis of experiencing sublime intellectual, emotional or moral force when reading poetry, and the ability to create that response in a reader. Lee writes of writing by the "hand" and by the "mouth" rather than the brain, of how when "prose rides rhythm it becomes poetry". "No matter how sad the story, pain always decreases after having spoken it," he writes, because "of rhythm". The sounds guide the poems, though Lee also notes that in vernacular speech, the approximation of which forms the sonic bases of poetry, "half of speaking is silence". "Don't forget," he says, "that in order to say something, you have to say it through something else."

Here is where Lee's meditations on metaphor are particularly astute. The first stage of composition, as he says in aphorism 60, is "drunkenness and mania". Described in aphorism 99, poetic language is

as precise as a cheetah biting into an antelope's vulnerable spot. For the sake of that one moment, you've got to keep throwing forth words like a dog frantically licking a hot dish.

Poetry, as he says in aphorism 213, needs "a point where it aches". Writing poetry, as he says in aphorism 218, must be like "an Inca priest ripping out the heart of a sacrificial child. In the midst of despair, there is no feeling of despair – only disgust." These are the propulsions that must help deliver a poem into being. The second is "like an algebraic formula". "You've got to build up each line like bricks in a strong brick wall," he states. It is precisely because language is "inherently opaque and unstable", it has to be "more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision." Precision does not entail didacticism. This is reflected by Lee's own reliance on metaphor, taking on an almost parable-like quality, in his explanation of the functions of metaphor in poetry.

Metaphors are like the fins that help a whale "change direction", to be used not for "going forward" but "only when you must". Writing poetry is like playing "the zither", to be pressed "down lightly if you want a deep and soft tone", a lightness more important than "fancy images". In the metaphors he chooses, Lee demonstrates the relish he takes in their selection. "Mount a poem lightly. Like it's a bike or a horse saddle, or a running tiger." "To write poetry is to let the object catch in the spider-web of language." Or viscerally:

Animals being unable to lie straight when sleeping is a metaphor for life's suffering. When I smell the stench of dog urine, it saddens me. Because it smells just like human urine. There is nothing that does not return to the suffering of people.

Beneath Lee's emphasis on the ephemera of daily living lies the wound that is said to reside at the heart of all poetry, metaphor turning back into the destitution of human suffering. "Literature has to approach hunger. Hungry stories are always fresh no matter how many times they're told," he says in aphorism 207. The core of a poem is "the faint melancholy that emanates from them," he says in aphorism 156. In aphorism 125, Lee states that "Poets return meaning to everything that has lost it, they are doing the work that has been neglected by the gods." Lee's poetics emphasises attention to that which is obscured, ignored or in ruins. It is a poetics conversant with pain and sorrow, one that requires particular affective grounding for form and image.

Metaphor is important but it is not metaphor that creates poetry. It is "form", defined by Lee as "the underlying rhythm" of the poem. Form "creates a pleasing drop, that feeling of released window blinds falling into place". Yet once form is revealed, it is "superficial and ornamental", like "dead branches on a living tree" that must be trimmed.

Despite a resistance to technical definition, Lee nevertheless retains some impulse to taxonomise or define. Presented largely through metaphor, they help to form a growing imagistic universe for how a poem should function or how it should stir a response in a reader. Take aphorism 265 for example:

Literature is something we obtain not by making but by throwing away. After everything that is important in the world is thrown away, literature is what remains. One shall lose if one tries to gain, and gain if one tries to lose – this truism also applies to literature.

Or in aphorism 290, pursuing a similar line of thought: 

The Silla Dynasty people of yore may have vanished but their Poseok Pavilion stone waterway remains. Like ad balloons persisting in the air despite all the eyes that have gazed upon them [having] moved on. As such, poetry will always remain even if we disappear. Like a skull dried out with age… even without anyone to be sad or joyful or to dream…

Lee presents the notion that poetry is necessarily an art of posterity, one that will outlast apocalyptic visions of desolation and disappearance. He cites the bygone Silla Dynasty and its remaining monuments, or the grisly image of a skull, representing mortality. That poetry should persist in the absence of a readership speaks to a particular contradiction relating to perception – how poetry will remain even if no one is present to read it.

Beyond the pedagogical impulse, which shapes Lee's view of where the writing of poetry should spring from and how poetry should be conceived of in the mind, Lee also presents a kind of ascetic impulse. This impulse pertains to how a poet should live. Poetry, he says in aphorism 358, is the "daily offering up of oneself through self-immolation (sosingongyang)". In aphorism 360, he describes the Avatamska Sutra that states that "raising the right frame of mind from the beginning enables immediate enlightenment (chobalsimsi byeonjeonggak)", illustrating how poetry is in the "place where worrying is". In aphorism 361, he says that "An artist is someone who never forgives a mistake […] Cleansing the self and burning away the self is the duty and task of a poet." Presented primarily within the frame of Seon Buddhism, Lee's vision of a life in poetry is an exacting one. It is entwined with the surrender of the ego, the purification of the self. It is a vision that foregrounds mental clarity and a perfectionist impulse. Asceticism folds into religiosity; Lee also steps away into other religious traditions, stating in aphorism 408:

To people writing poetry, poetry is God. Borrowing from the words of John of the Cross, the poet must live as if they and poetry are the only things in the world. It doesn't matter if "poetry" here is replaced with "truth" or "beauty". When Monet died, he said he had seen nothing that was truly ugly in this world, and Rodin once said anything can be an object of pilgrimage.

While Lee mentions Confucius, Mencius and the Buddha in other aphorisms, the introduction of the medieval mystic John of the Cross presents, perhaps, not a dialogic turn but a fluency in multiple intellectual traditions. The principle here is of devotion: a singularity of vision devoted to poetry. One must look inward for the purification of the self, and outward to sharpen one's attention in service of poetry, truth and beauty.

When translating Korean literature to English, Hur has spoken of how if the voice of the author in the original Korean is singular and strong, it will shine through like a light through the pane of a translation. Much of this is the case in Lee's aphorisms. However, Hur has also commented that he initially found the book too odd to find an audience in translation. In an interview with Foyles, Hur explains that the book was rejected for funding by the Literary Translation Institute of Korea twice before being published in Seattle by Sublunary Press. The book's first print run sold out, buoyed, perhaps unexpectedly, by the endorsement of the rapper and songwriter RM. Known as a member of BTS, RM has also leveraged his global influence to recommend books. Already a fan of Lee Seong-bok's poetry, RM's recommendation of Hur's translation helped to build popular and commercial interest. These contributed to the book's nomination for a National Book Critics Circle Award, followed by its publication by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books based in the United Kingdom.

The book's circulation across the United States and the UK, as well as the many other locations its readers may be best, suggests a growing recognition of the capacity of translated literature, or even literature from outside the Anglophone world and Europe, to contribute to knowledge of craft. The recent slate of international literary accolades accorded to Korean writers in translation, such as Han Kang, Bora Chung and Sang Young Park, might suggest this much is obvious. Yet one cannot help but think of the colonial notions that lurk in the world of translated literature, whether among the editors, critics or writers based in the Anglophone metropoles of translation, namely New York and London.

Firstly, the notion that the intricacies of craft work cannot be captured well in translation, and even more so for languages more distant from English, so such an endeavour may well be fruitless. Exceptions are often made for the French, if one thinks of the historical influence of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva or Jacques Derrida. Secondly, the notion that contemporary literature outside of the US and Western Europe is notable primarily as statements of conscience, with aesthetic dimensions being too different to be appreciated in any noteworthy way. My friend, the translation scholar Spencer Lee-Lenfield, refers to these two attitudes confronting the translation of craft discourse as a form of "aesthetic xenophobia".

That Hur has brought Lee's aphorisms into English to a British and broader Anglophone audience, following on from an American audience, is a reminder of the ways that such notions are manifestly untrue. That Korean literature today is so deeply influenced by and proximate to European literature via translation, with European dadaism, surrealism and modernism shaping the maturation of modern Korean literature in the early 20th century, suggests that Hur's translation of Lee performs a kind of reversal. Hur's decision to translate Lee insists that there remain some fundamental elements of excellence in craft that are common across languages, though these elements are neither hegemonic nor so universal as to lose their specificity. This is evidenced by the fact that there are certain ideas, concepts and references that Hur chooses to leave untranslated from the Korean and not glossed over for the Anglophone reader, though one suspects that a growing familiarity with Korean culture across the world might render this less necessary than before. Korean food, locations and traditional practices are often metaphors employed by Lee in his aphorisms.

There is both immediacy and impatience in the way that Lee describes writing and editing poetry, an impatience toward the extraneous, unnecessary and encumbering. Or in using a Korean culinary metaphor, poetry is better as "a simple dwenjang soup like on any other evening" with "a few ingredients", rather than "a hanjeongsik fixed course with scores of banchan sides". Lee prizes simplicity rather than ostentation. Lee also turns to the Seon concept of "ipgyeokchulgyeok" in aphorism 462, describing how "only by fully complying with form can one become free from that form. To come into a frame means to exit it. Poetry is also about leaving a frame using one's strength and talent."

Lee's aphorisms endure, smouldering in the mind. They are evocative, surprising and thoroughly concerned with the endeavour of writing itself. Some aphorisms may strike a student of poetry as familiar, contending against cliches and footnotes and banalities and superficialities. Others bear the weight of the struggle essential to poetry. To conclude, I present the two that I will continue to turn over in my mind:

203.
Poems are prayers. Not a prayer begging for the gods to do something but a promise to live by their will. Poetry is a burnt offering. It's to burn a sacrifice so thoroughly that no one can eat it. Because there is nothing more to lose, poetry is where the heart can finally be safe.

470.
There's a saying – dangranggeocheol – which means, a praying mantis stands before a wheelbarrow, guilelessly challenging it to a battle. A ridiculous and pathetic situation, but perhaps poetry is the same. To hug a huge tree and try to rip it from the earth. To go all in on a fight that can only be lost, where failure is certain. Because if we can't even do that, what indeed, can we do?

_____