Prologue Miwon

Part 1 scene

Enumeration 1
Jeon Mi-rae
wash
plants
house

Part 2 Things

Umbrella worries
Clothes to wear at home
Good memories
Pick up a pencil
Use a handkerchief
Don't drink beer
Gurye, Gurye
Winter Dream

Part 3 novel

narrow world
Novel sentences
I'm doing well
Enumeration 2
It's repetitive, but it's okay
light, shade
What is your name?
If you don't have to think about becoming something, that's probably the best thing.

Part 4 People

Seasonal Memory
Matter and sleep
Repetition that saves
My favorite sentence
somewhat false
What happens to us
A person who only I know

What's left behind in the epilogue

“How much have you changed and then gone back to where you were?”
Opening the margins of the story with delicate language
Poet Im Seung-yu's first collection of prose

Poet Seung-Yu Lim's first prose collection, "Text Memory Practice," which opens up a story of a clear but not yet fixed, opaque future in the most distinct and delicate language, and constructs a unique space of tension with the world, has been published by Achimdal.
The poet, who began his career through Literature and Society in 2011, has published his first collection of prose in 14 years. The world of poetry and life that the poet has penetrated over the years are told in more vivid and specific stories.
This book, finally born after a long period of writing, opens the way for a deeper exploration of the stories of female characters that the poet has repeatedly told in his poetry, and calmly shows the events that took place in the neighborhood where the poet lived and the people he met.

Lim Seung-yu's prose has many similarities to his poetry.
Readers who have been following the poet's poetry for a long time will be very pleased with this collection of prose.
This is because, through prose, we can obtain a more certain origin of the path through which the poems written by Seungyu Lim came to us.
But the poet's prose is unique in another way.
He usually lightly escapes the idea that prose is a writing that can show and prove an individual's life.
The reason this is possible is because I wrote the text in a way that my memory practices the text from the moment the sentences are written, rather than in a way that I write the text to remember the scene.
In other words, the world of prose unfolded by poet Seung-yu Lim guarantees the life of an individual, but strictly speaking, it is woven anew in the form of memories rewriting life.

For the poet, reality is full of countless gaps.
Poets have always lived as writers, feeling a sense of dissonance with this reality.
Just as his poetry maintains appropriate spacing between lines while subtly leaving a distance between stanzas, he adopts the same attitude in his prose.
He does not describe the places he once visited in a 're-experience' manner.
Instead, the story starts with sentences that make the story somewhat disjointed, such as, “Do you know who I met when I went to Miwon a while ago?” (Prologue “Miwon”), which the mother never said, or “If I’m going to write something about a girl, I should write it in enumeration form” (Enumeration 1), without going into the details of the scene.
Lim Seung-yu calls this “practice,” because for him, texts are always “things imagined beyond reality” (“I’m Doing Well”), and the poet himself only perceives reality belatedly through sentences, so later, memory becomes the subject and tries to rescue scenes from the past that were once lost.
The poet speaks of the space he creates:
“I tried to create a margin by making sentences with large strides.
“Imagine what might be in that space later.” (Laundry)

Seung-Yu Lim tells his story in a rather lumpy manner.
These lumps do not interfere with the specificity of the story, but rather show that the margins that are inevitably written into reality create space, rejecting sentences as tools for describing scenes and taking steps further than memory, along a different path.

From the scene to the person
A unique enumeration of strides

In this collection of essays, the scene on which poet Seung-yu Lim spends the most time is the fragments of childhood.
The first poem, “The Effect of a Hat,” included in her first poetry collection, “I Gave Birth to a Child, But I Was Not Enough,” begins with the first sentence, “Go to your relatives’ house.”
These words are directly connected to the poet's childhood.
The experience of living at a relative's house and washing my brother's sneakers that my relative's aunt gave me to wash, squatting by the faucet and washing them with soap, is a passage that allows me to directly understand where the position of speech as a woman has usually been.
For Seung-yu Lim, childhood is the background and basis for repeatedly speaking of a 'girl', an unfamiliar place that can barely be reached through sentences.
The poet begins this book by talking about a 'house' that he was afraid to enter.
Only by starting from the death of the father I wanted to ignore can I rescue the “me I left behind” in my memories (“The Person Only I Know”).

The poet presents four keywords to the reader to help them examine his own life.
This book is divided into four parts, each of which refers to ‘scenes,’ ‘objects,’ ‘novels,’ and ‘people.’
Part 1, 'Scenes', is mainly about childhood, starting with the death of the father and continuing with the story of the mother leaving home, and recalling memories of going to the stream with the mother before she left home and doing laundry under the moonlight, as well as the countless houses they visited.
In "Plants," which touches on the life of a poet who actually loves and grows plants, life is broadly contemplated through the determination of plants that grow silently.
Part 2, 'Things', introduces stories made with familiar objects from everyday life, such as an umbrella left behind after not meeting the person you were supposed to meet, clothes, shoes, pencils, handkerchiefs, and beer.
For the poet, things become “a means to reach people” (“A Certain False”).
Part 3, 'Novels', introduces various texts that have helped the poet advance his life, including novels he enjoyed reading, and fully displays the poet's writing sensibility that he has been contemplating.
In this part in particular, the poet expresses his deep understanding and thoughts about 'sentences'.
For a poet, the sense of repeating something is very important.
“I keep doing something over and over again to try to do it well somehow.
“It creates a form that repeats.” (“It’s Repetitive, But It’s Okay”) As the poet had wished, in the last sentence of the prose “Only the Bones Remain” included in his second poetry collection “Something Else,” he said, “I wish places would repeat infinitely.” Through this, he willingly dedicates sentences to memories that cannot help but fall into the shackles of infinite repetition as he continues to live in a form that continues to repeat the places he has lived.
Part 4, ‘People’, consists of writings that reflect the poet’s inner self, which returns to people after going through objects.
There are things like trying to transfer memories of the mysterious being called 'mother', whom I wanted to talk about at length at least once, by mixing in "some lies" and calling her "you", and trying to reach out to myself completely.

The rhetorical device primarily used in this collection of essays, which starts from a scene and reaches a person, is 'enumeration.'
According to the poet, enumeration is “one of the ways to avoid falling into a hole.”
Instead of writing in detail about the scenes he was in, Seung-Yu Lim simply lists the events as they happened.
Enumeration gives a sense of speed to the sentence and is a “non-serious technique” (“Enumeration 2”), so even if objects of the same hierarchy are listed, at some point objects of a different level are placed side by side, dramatically changing the situation.
This is the stride that Seung-yu Lim takes with a keen sense, and the repeated scenes of life are an escape route that is “good for escaping from situations with language.”

For Seung-yu Lim, memory means “not being able to enter that scene right away.”
To remember something, you need post-mortem sentences.
So the poet begins with a sentence.
“Don’t take that, Unnie.” “Where’s the Vaseline?” “That’s a really good memory.” “I picked a flower.” Sentences like these go before memories and find the characters in the scene.
The reason the poet's words are often tilted may mean that they are on the verge of falling over due to a precarious slope, but it may also be to reveal the "place" (from "A Person Only I Know") where there should be memories that keep watch over the words so that they can rest a little.
That is why Seung-Yu Lim is not someone who doubts his memory.
Seung-Yu Lim is a person who becomes a blank slate and a margin so that memory can practice text.