문학과 지성사

Lee Seongbok, who has written poems since the late 1970s, has used his poetry to express cynicism about the world as it is. His poetic tendency as such was already expressed through his destruction of poetic form in his first poetry book. He destroyed the grammar of traditional Korean lyric poetry through his complete betrayal of linguistic and social taboos. His destruction, however, doesn’t mean just destruction but can be regarded as a de-construction in the sense of pursuing a new, modern revival of lyric poetry.

Namhae Geumsan is his second volume of poems. The theme that draws our attention in this book is shame. Shame as theme is found in many poems of this volume. It is found in “a bowl of cooked rice”(from “End of Shame”), in the “road pooled with rain”(from “Raindrops from Far Away”), in the heart of waiting(from “Spring Came Again”). These feelings of shame and despair fundamentally alienate the poetic narrator from the world. Yet, this alienation of his poetic self from the world reflects our contemporary life in its structure.

Therefore, if a certain desire for destruction is to be found in his poems, it’s because life today is itself destructive. Even in the midst of destruction, however, beauty is perceived in the pain, an aesthetic scarcely found in the poems of other poets, and this is possible because the poet’s pain and shame can themselves be transformed into a desire for life.

Lee Seongbok’s ‘shame’ is thus sometimes not just an outcry of desperation but an expression of lyrical peacefulness. In this volume of lyric poems arranged in a manner suggesting an epic structure, the poet directly confronts the origins of sadness not just at the base of a broken life but in the sadness of daily life. He exalts tragic sentiment to the extreme. With his dialectic of shame and beauty, sharply revealing the sick interior of the 1980s, Lee Seongbok enriched the Korean poetry of that era more than any other poet.