indeterminate inflorescence

59.
I say this often, but a poem is 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.

61.
Because poetry must use language, which is inherently opaque and unstable, it has to be more precise than mathematics. For poets, there is no higher morality than precision.

110.
Truth, goodness, and beauty exist in a symmetrical structure within the object. Observe Hongyemun Gate. It has no supporting structure and simply exists in a structure of itself. Once the structure of an object is discovered, there is no need for any other rhetoric or embellishment. There isn’t much else that needs to be done.

146.
Unlike army soldiers, navy sailors grow their hair a little longer. It’s easier that way to grab onto when pulling them out of the water. That’s what details are like. The things that decide life or death have always been the smallest things.

—Lee Seong-bok, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class (ALLEN LANE/Penguin, 2023), translated by Anton Hur

annotated copy

How does one make so many thoughtful notes in the margins, mark the key passages, underline so many sentences, and then let the book go, so that it may find its way into my hands.

notes and chords

If language is our instrument, the words and phrases are our notes and chords.

[This cannot be a new thought.]

two thirds done

I thought I wasn’t very far along reading the academic book, then I realized the last third of the book was notes, bibliography and index.

from one to another

You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to another.
—Dizzy Gillespie*

You only have so many words, and what makes a style is how you get from one word to another.

*Quoted in J. D. McClatchy’s Sweet Theft: A poet’s commonplace book (Counterpoint Press, 2016)

twenty-six tones

A whole alphabet of musical notes.