Lee Sumyeong (Hangul: 이수명, born 1965) is a South Korean poet, critic, and translator. Her poetic style has reputation of being unfamiliar and difficult, but some also comment that she is a classicist as well as a modernist. One critic has said that she has already "laid out a completed road", upon the genealogy of modernism and that "many younger poets are working on that road", emphasizing the fact that her poetry was pioneering in how she overturned common usage of words and stereotypes. Life Born and raised in Seoul, Lee Sumyeong studied Korean language and literature at Seoul National University. Her debut publication of 5 poems in the literary journal Jakkasegye (Writer's World) won the journal's 1994 New Writer Award. In 2007, she received her doctorate from Chung-Ang University with a study of Kim Ku-yong, a major literary influence. Her monograph is one of the pioneering works about the hitherto rarely discussed poet. She is known as one of the poets that represents Korea's modernism since the 1990s. She has published many essays on poetry, critical essay collections, and research papers on modernism. She has won the 2nd Park In-Hwan Literary Award in 2001, the 12th Hyeondaesi (Contemporary Poetics) Award in 2011, the 12th Nojak Literary Prize in 2012, and the 7th Yi Sang Poetry Award in 2014. She participate in the 2016 Seoul International Writer's Festival (SIWF). Writing Lee Sumyeong has been strongly influenced by Korean avant-garde poets, including Yi Sang, Kim Ku-yong, and Kim Jongsam, as well as by Western poets like Wallace Stevens, Paul Celan, and René Char. Renowned for the "impenetrability" and the deceptive "tidy-style," Lee Sumyeong's works, some critics claim, may be interpreted as the search for a radical way to "let things, not humans, speak". Lee Sumyeong's first poetry collection was Saeroun odoki georireul mewotda (새로운 오독이 거리를 메웠다 New Misreading Filled the Streets). The title signifies poet Lee Sumyeong's critical mind. Misreading is the act of distorting the linguistic content, but from the poet's perspective, language inevitably becomes in discordance with reality. Lee Sumyeong accepts this fact, and instead of attempting to do the impossible dream of copying reality accurately, she attempts to overturn everyday phrases. On that aspect, Lee Sumyeong was a poet who "started from the position of reflecting on the violence of lyric poetry and poetic subjects that have become a constituent custom" (Park Sang-su). However, that does not