Any attempt to defend poems of a so-called “difficult” or “modernist” tendency—terms often used to deal wholesale with the enormous variety of poems that can’t be understood in a single glance—will be met with ridicule from three directions. First, those with no desire whatsoever to read such poems will criticize them as poetic elitism. Next, supposed experts will dispose of them as an immature and pretentious taste peculiar to modernism, with the additional observation that such endeavors are in no way new. Lastly—and this is perhaps the biggest hurdle—the difficult poems themselves won’t even particularly appreciate anyone coming to their defense.

      Under these circumstances, it strikes me as a wonder that such poems are still being written at all. Often described as standing on the side of language and things while dealing sharply an  dcritically with the privileged, human-centric perspective, Lee Sumyeong’s work is a typical example of poetry that runs up against these complaints. If such complaints do contain an element of truth—despite being obviously incomplete and outdated—it’s that they share a kind of attitude that might be referred toas a rejection of exceptionality. And this is the exact point that makes Lee’s poetry unique. Her poetry does not facilely do away with these complaints, but instead passes through them in order to realize its own strange impulse to bebroken into pieces.

I eat an apple every morning. Apple piles up in my body. Once I’m completely full of apples, the apples finally die. When the apples die, I look at the apple tree. The apple tree is beautiful.

Sometimes something else happens. The apples I eat flee from me. Apples shining and fragrant like the sun, the sun of today which murdered yesterday. The apples set the apple tree ablaze. The apple tree is beautiful.

—“AppleTree”

       At first, we can read this poem through the clear contrast of the first and second stanzas. To understand an object, and thereby incorporate it within the self, means fixing the object within a rigid frame which cannot ultimately reveal the object in full. In short, “Once I’m completely full of apples, the apples finally die.” The understanding and enjoyment of the object is premised upon the object’s death.

       But what happens when we encounter an object which we cannot understand, which we cannot digest?As an example, when we encounter a poem whose meaning is ultimately elusive, or which doesn’t look like a poem at all, we come face to face with the fact that our existing concept of poetry itself is insufficient—we lose certainty. At the moment something we once knew becomes something we do not know, that thing flees our existing system of understanding and is reborn into its most vital form—“Apples shining and fragrant like the sun.”

       This isn’t a bad reading of the poem—that is, if we can pretend that we haven’t seen the final line of both stanzas: “The apple tree is beautiful.” In fact, this sentence decisively prevents the poem’s integration into the familiar logic of the more exclusionary defenses for avant-garde poetry. It’s true that the poem’s first stanza depicts a routine, everyday world beginning from the line “I eat an apple every morning,” and it’s true that the second stanza depicts an exceptional temporality initiated by the line “Sometimes something else happens.” However, it is significant that the poem does not defend this exceptional function insofar as it contrasts with the everyday. On the contrary, the most important structural feature of the poem is that, whether the apples are accumulating or fleeing, we arrive at the same sentence: “The apple tree is beautiful.” The poem establishes the two different temporalities as ultimately identical. The sentence “The apple tree is beautiful” is a kind of dead end. There’s nothing better to be had. (Though it would certainly be nice if a poem could, in fact, offer us a better path than the one provided by day-to-day life, but I digress.) As a result, we as readers may be able to open up some interpretative distance by suggesting that the first stanza’s final line has an ironic tone, or something similar, but the poem itself does not add anything to that sentence. It is silent. And the reason it is silent is that poetry does not seek to escape the everyday and occupy an exceptional location, but rather to cross such boundaries and eventually renounce the exceptional altogether.

               Though it may sound strange, the most distinct and productive poetry, the poetry of dislocation, is poetry which can be free even from its own location and uniqueness. It does not depend entirely on its originality, and at some point, even its distinction from other things is unimportant. [. . .] Thus, it does not distance itself from the hard, the fixed, or the unmoving, but presses into them, melds with them, and become sunclear._[1] 

       Therefore, the statement that Lee Sumyeong’s poetry attempts to shed the human-centric perspective must be read carefully, because such a statement often implies an escape from some kind of impurity into a pure construction of language. But Lee’s interest is clearly separate from that desire. For her, modern poetry can no longer be found in that kind of utopian locatedness. This is true even in the poems that appear to depart as much as possible from our everyday language:

Heron is jump-rope.

Heron is pit.

Heron is throat.

Heron is kidnapping.

—“HeronsPlay the Heron Game”

       In this poem, it’s unclear why the heron is called a jump-rope, a pit, a throat, and a kidnapping. We could attempt to infer the connection between these words and the heron, for instance by taking a metonymical approach based on the heron’s long, distinctive neck. However, if we see the first stanza as giving the heron nicknames—that is, as a kind of naming—then we don’t have to look for causal connections because names are arbitrary. Next we find counting sentences in the lines “The tables are one. / The tables are two. / The tables are three.” These are sensical sentences, possible in everyday language._[2]  Then the heron, which holds the place of naming, dives onto the table, which holds the place of counting. It breaks the table, occupies the position of counting, and then comes to an end in the lines “The herons are one. / The herons are two. / The herons are three. / The herons are none.” In other words, the poem views naming and counting as identical, and the heron and table as exchangeable, thereby achieving a unique confusion and movement. The central point here is that the poem’s confusion is not produced by exclusively pushing the arbitrariness of naming, but by placing naming on the same surface as the strict sequentiality of counting.

       This partially explains why Lee’s recent work in Distribution Warehouse and City Gas tends to maintain comparatively “everyday” scenery and descriptions. Poetry is a language that attempts to not know the difference between avant-garde and everyday language. Therefore, this change in her poetry is neither a step forward nor a step back. Instead, the key to poetry is not to remain segregated and preserved within some sort of originality, but to be exposed, refracted, and altered while erasing the borders themselves. Lee is the poet most faithful to the fact that poetry must be open to both modes of disappearance—isolation and dissolution. Therefore, although this may seem a paradoxical point because she is one of the most linguistically cutting-edge poets, there is no poetry more appropriate for translation. John Cage once said that “The way to test a modern painting is this: If it is not destroyed by the action of shadows, it is a genuine oil painting. A cough or a baby crying will not ruin a good piece of modern music._”[3]  In the same way, despite all its difficulties, translation will not ruin Lee’s poetry, because the words and sentences in her poems are optimized in the first place not for preservation or conveyance but destruction. They attempt to lose direction, and translation will help them do so.

       One day we will read Lee Sumyeong’s poems translated back into Korean from their translated versions, without reference to the originals, just as we and the scenery switch places in the line “The scenery’s placed in our spot, and we’re in the scenery’s spot.” This line comes from one of my favorite poems in Distribution Warehouse. It includes both the motifs of isolation (floating above) and dissolution (swelling up), and between these two motifs, the poet adds that we must “hastily write, / ‘We are dead.’” In agreement with the poet, I hastily quote the poem’s full text to close this essay.

Don’t You Want to Scribble on Shirts?

Don’t you want to walk down the street today as the lights turn on slowly one by one?

Don’t you want to float the sky above?

Don’t you want to hastily write,

“We are dead” on shirts swelling up?

Where did I put the scenery? Nothing goes like it’s supposed to

The scenery’s placed in our spot, and we’re in the scenery’s spot

Your and my whole bodies

When we stuff our faces into each other’s flying curly hair

And not a single word bursts forth

Don’t you want to turn the lights on slowly one by one?

I want to sit side by side I want to imitate

Events I can’t remember

I’m already saying all of today I’m going to today

Let’s go to today

O Today, let’s go away forever

Where

Did I bury you?

Don’t you want to scrawl dark scribbles together?

Each wearing a T-shirt that knows nothing

That doesn’t know how to change direction

Beneath the quickly downward-floating sky

Translated by Seth Chandler

Korean Works Mentioned:

• Distribution Warehouse (Moonji, 2018)

  『물류창고』 (문학과지성사, 2018)

• City Gas (Moonji, 2022)

  『도시 가스』 (문학과지성사, 2022)

[1]     Lee Sumyeong, “Jihyanghajimanjihyanghaji an neun geot” [To Be Directed Yet Not Directed], in Pyomyeonuisihak [Poetics of Surface] (Paju: Nanda, 2018), 99.

[2]    [Translator’s Note] These lines sound natural in Korean and could be translated as “There is one table. / There are two tables./ There are three tables.” However, in Korean, verbs do not inflect for number, and plural marking of nouns is optional, so there is no “is → are” or “table →tables” change in the source text, and the only word that changes across the lines is the number itself, as in the translation above. The sentence structure is also identical to the opening lines, with only the numbers replaced by the words jump-rope, pit, throat, and kidnapping, as the critic goes on to point out.

[3]     John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 161.