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Indeterminate Inflorescence
  • Published: 14 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802067699
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176
Categories:

Indeterminate Inflorescence

Notes from a Poetry Class

Formats & editions
Hardback
18 Feb 2025
EBook
14 Nov 2024
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How do you write a poem? These startling and beautiful meditations on poetry offer a provocative new answer

Kick against words like you would kick back on a swing. You’ve got to feel as if the soles of your feet are touching the sky.

Indeterminate Inflorescence is a collection of meditations on poetry, art and life, taken from the creative writing lectures of Lee Seong-bok, one of South Korea’s most prominent living poets.

These 470 aphorisms, collected by his students, are evocative micropoems in their own right. Some express ideas at once familiar and breathtakingly new – truths we could sense but not put into words. Others unfurl fresh vistas and offer worlds to explore in their exciting and inspiring poetics.

Together, they offer an invigorating and original answer to the questions: How – and why – do we write at all? What does it mean to create? And how should we see the world?
  • Published: 14 November 2024
  • ISBN: 9781802067699
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176
Categories:

About the author

Lee Seong-bok

Born in Sangju, South Korea, in 1952, LEE SEONG-BOK is the author of eight poetry collections, as well as works of literary criticism and essays on photography. In 2023, Sublunary Editions published Indeterminate Inflorescence, a volume of 470 aphorisms collected by his students at Keimyung University, in Daegu, wwhere he has taught creative writing and French literature for more than four decades.
portrait photo of Lee Seong-bok

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Praise for Indeterminate Inflorescence

Iridescent and intransigently nuanced, these aphorisms collected by students show the worldly intelligence of an inspiring teacher and a highly accomplished poet. The wisdom encoded in this book challenges us to rethink our craft as writers and our preconceptions as readers. It’s a book I’ll keep returning to year after year

Kit Fan

A brilliant and beautiful book; new required reading for all of us as we continue on in our life-long study of poetry and the world

Andrew McMillan

As pragmatic as it is beautiful … Hur’s translation is limpid and witty

Tablet *Books of the Year*

Provocative … There’s a reason Lee’s students have been scribbling down his every word

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Prospect

Provocative and inspiring, this is a new poetry essential

Fiona Sampson, Guardian

Lee's aphorisms endure, smouldering in the mind. They are evocative, surprising and thoroughly concerned with the endeavour of writing itself

Jonathan Chan
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