Lee Seong-bok

Lee Seong-bok (Hangul: 이성복) is a South Korean poet known for his imaginative and multi-layered poetry.^[1]

Life

Lee Seong-bok was born on June 4, 1952 in Gyeongsangbuk-do, Korea.^[2] Lee earned both his M.A. and B.A. from Seoul National University and has taught French Literature at Keimyung University in Daegu.^[3]

Work

Lee Seong-bok’s poetry evokes events and landscapes unfolding above a horizon of unlimited interpretive possibilities. As Kim Hyeon stated of Lee Seong-bok’s poetry, "It vastly expands its meaning to permit endless questions, not only on an individual or private level, but on a collective and public one as well."^[4]

Lee has attracted attention for his imaginative and multi-layered poetry which features European influences including Baudelaire, Kafka and Nietzsche and often attacks the corruption, hypocrisy and perversion of the modern world.^[5]

Lee's poetry suggests that all things exist in relation to other things, and that there is no core or isolated act. All binary categories—the collective versus individual or the social versus the ontological—are simultaneously one. But Lee’s poetry does not deny opposition itself. Rather, through such distinctions, his poetic world reads more dynamically, and represents the overcoming of life's pain with the strength gained through the exchange of meanings from opposing categories^[6]

Works in Translation

• I heard Life Calling Me; poems of Yi Song-Bok (남해금산/ 뒹구는 돌)
• Wie anders sind die Nächte (아, 입이 없는 것들)

Works in Korean (Partial)

When Will the Rolling Stone Awaken (Dwingguneun dol-eun eonje jam kkaeneunga, 1980)

Awards

• 2nd Kim Suyeong Literature Prize (1982)
• Fourth annual Kim Sowol Poetry Prize (1990)
• Contemporary Literature (Hyundae Munhak) Award (2008)

References