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Lee Junhyeok assigned the poem in the third week of April.
The assignment: each student would choose a poem from the literature anthology, read it at home until they understood it in the body rather than only in the head—he used this phrase, 몸으로 이해할 때까지 (until you understand it with the body), which landed differently for Woojin than it probably landed for the other twenty-six children—and present it to the class. Not a memorized recitation. Not a performed reading. “그냥—읽어요.” (Just—read it.) “이 시를—내가 읽는다는 느낌으로.” (With the feeling that I am reading this poem.) The personal relationship to the text, not the performance of the text.
He had given this assignment before—he said so in the explanation—and the results varied widely. Some children performed. Some children froze. Some children read as if the words were the inventory of a list. And occasionally, he said without specificity, a child read it the way it was meant to be read.
He did not define the way it was meant to be read.
He did not need to. Woojin understood.
He spent the evening with the anthology.
He read the poems.
He was not choosing the poem he could perform best—he was choosing the poem that his body already knew something about. The body’s prior knowing: which poem produced the 0.3-second response, the body’s recognition before the head assembled the interpretation.
He read through the first section: spring poems, landscape poems, the specific tradition of Korean lyric verse. Each one read once and then the body checked. Some produced nothing—the head processing the imagery without the body’s prior response. Some produced a small thing—a slight chest-quality, the body acknowledging the poem without the full recognition.
He reached the fourteenth poem.
나무. (Tree.) The poet’s name was one he had not encountered before. The poem was twenty-two lines. A tree standing in the wind—not the ginkgo’s specific fan-leaf, an unspecified tree—and what the tree knew from standing in the wind for a long time. The tree’s knowledge was not the knowledge of the leaves moving: the knowledge was in the roots. The deep-ground knowing, the knowing that was prior to the wind’s arrival, the roots having been in the ground for long enough that the ground itself had become part of the tree’s body.
He felt the body’s response: the chest-warmth. Full. The 0.3-second recognition arriving before the head had completed the second stanza.
This one.
He put the anthology down.
He thought: Park Jiyeon’s tree. My tree. The poem is about what I know.
He read the poem again, slowly, with the body attending.
Line by line: the roots in the ground—the prior knowing, the accumulated watching. The wind arriving—the performance, the unfamiliar partner, the stimulus. The tree’s response—from the roots, from what had been in the ground for a long time, not from the leaves’ immediate reaction to the wind.
The roots are the 0.3-second window, he thought. The tree receives the wind in the roots before the leaves move.
He read it a third time.
He put the prior receiving in the body: the six years of watching, the nine months of training, the body’s yellow, the daily street practice, the loop with Kim Minjun. The weight of the accumulation—the roots of what he had been building. He held the weight in the chest.
He read the poem again from the weight.
It’s different, he thought. The same words. Different reader.
He had said this before—the theater book at different readings, the birthday text at different ages. The same text arriving differently in a body that had accumulated more. The poem about the tree reading differently in the body of someone who knew about roots.
He practiced three times that evening, not performing—receiving. Each reading: holding the accumulated weight and allowing the poem’s words to arrive in the weight rather than constructing the words from the head’s processing.
The presentations ran over three days: eight students per day, the order randomized.
He was assigned to the second day.
He watched the first-day presentations.
He watched them with the full vocabulary active: the body’s state, the spatial grammar of the front of the classroom, the giving and receiving between the reader and the audience. What he saw:
Most children were performing the poem. The performed version—the voice adjusting for the audience, the body slightly stiff with the social awareness of being watched, the text arriving from the head’s recitation rather than from the body’s receiving. Not bad reading—competent, the words clear, the meaning communicated. But the 0.3-second window closed: the social protection covering the body’s first response to the text, the performance replacing the receiving.
Two children were not performing.
The first: a girl named Kim Haewon, who had been quiet through the first month of 5학년, whose desk position was the back-left corner. She stood at the front with her anthology and read her poem—about rain—with the quality of someone for whom rain was a body-known thing rather than an imagery-sequence. She was not performing rain; she was in the body that knew rain, and the poem arrived from that body. The class received it—the quality of the receiving shifted slightly in the room, the classroom’s collective attention changing texture.
The second: Siwoo.
Siwoo stood at the front with the philosophical quality he brought everywhere—the window-watching quality, translated to the front of the room. He had chosen a poem about distance. He read it with the long-watching quality of someone who had been at the window looking at the sky since first grade, the distance the poem described being the distance he had been looking at for five years. The poem arrived from the prior knowing.
Lee Junhyeok, watching from the side: he made no comment during the presentations. He sat in the teacher’s chair to the side of the front and watched with the full-attention quality. No notes—he was receiving.
Second day.
Woojin’s turn was fifth out of eight.
He sat in his seat through the first four presentations—three performed, one genuine (another quiet child whose prior knowing of the poem was visible in the body’s settled quality).
His name.
He walked to the front.
He stood.
The classroom: twenty-seven children in the receiving state of an audience—varied, some fully attending, some partially, the social protection of the classroom-audience present in most of them. Lee Junhyeok at the side. Park Jiyeon in her window-adjacent seat. Siwoo at the far window.
He stood in the spatial grammar of the front of the classroom.
Not the stage—the classroom front was its own spatial grammar. Lower ceiling than a theater. The desks closer to him than theater seats. The audience familiar—classmates, not strangers. The familiarity was different from the studio familiarity: not the floor he had trained on, the faces of the people he had been sharing a classroom with for five years across various classes.
He held the weight.
The six years of watching. The roots.
He opened the anthology.
He read.
Not to the class—from the weight. The way Kim Sunhee had asked him to say the six-line monologue passage from the body’s yellow: the text arriving in the established weight rather than being constructed toward the audience.
나무는—뿌리로 안다.
The tree knows—through the roots.
The words arrived from the weight. Not performed—received. The poem about the tree’s root-knowing landing in the body of someone who had roots of his own: six years of watching, the accumulated prior knowing, the body that had been receiving before it had the vocabulary for receiving.
He read through the twenty-two lines.
He finished.
He stood in the finish.
The classroom was quiet.
Not the polite quiet of the classroom audience—a slightly different quality. The quality he had felt in the August showing when the loop had rotated for the full scene and Oh Seyeon had shifted in his chair. The quality of something being received rather than witnessed.
He returned to his seat.
After the final presentation that day, Lee Junhyeok sat on his desk—not the teacher’s position at the front but the informal sit on the desk’s edge—and looked at the class.
“오늘—두 가지 읽기가 있었어요.” (Today—there were two kinds of reading.) He said it with the quality of the observation. Not evaluation—the naming of what had been present. “하나는—시를 전달하는 읽기.” (One—reading that delivers the poem.) The competent reading that communicated the poem’s content. “하나는—시에서 읽는 읽기.” (One—reading from within the poem.) He let this distinction settle. He did not say who had done which kind.
He looked at the class.
“차이가 뭔지—알아요?” (Do you know what the difference is?)
The children thought. Various responses: one said the voice quality. One said the speed. One said whether they had memorized it.
Lee Junhyeok: “시를—알고 있는 사람이냐, 아니냐야.” (Whether the person—knows the poem or not.) He said it. “외워서 아는 게 아니야.” (Not knowing it from memorizing.) He looked at the class. “몸으로 아는 거야.” He said it. 몸으로. The body’s knowing. The phrase he had used in the original assignment—몸으로 이해할 때까지—now returned as the description of the result.
He looked at Woojin briefly—not a pointed look, a passing acknowledgment—and continued.
“내일 마지막 날이야.” (Tomorrow is the last day.) “생각해봐요.” (Think about it.) He got up from the desk and the class was dismissed.
At the coat hooks, Park Jiyeon.
He had not planned to talk to her—they were simply arriving at the coat hooks at the same time. But she spoke first, which was unusual for her.
“나무 시였어.” (It was the tree poem.) She said it with the flat quality. Not a question.
“응.” He agreed.
She looked at him. The brief look that was her version of assessment.
“뿌리로 안다는 거.” (The knowing through the roots.) She said it. “내 나무도—뿌리로 알아.” (My tree too—knows through the roots.) She was connecting the poem to her own tree writing—the forty-seven pages, the tree’s watching as holding. The tree’s roots as the accumulated watching that preceded the wind’s arrival.
“알아.” He said it.
She thought.
“우리가 쓰는 게—같은 나무야.” (What we’re writing about—is the same tree.) She said it with the matter-of-fact quality of an observation that had just arrived. Not a declaration—the specific directness of someone who had been holding a thing and suddenly saw its shape clearly.
He looked at her.
“응.” He said it.
They were standing at the coat hooks in the spring afternoon, the same school they had been sharing since first grade, and she had just named something that had been accumulating between them since the발표회 in November 2009.
The same tree, he thought. Different roots.
Her roots: the writing. The forty-seven pages of watching-as-holding. His roots: the watching that had been accumulating in the body since October 2007.
Both trees. Different growing. Same ground.
“나중에 더 보여줄게.” (I’ll show you more later.) She picked up her bag and left.
He stood at the coat hooks for a moment after she was gone.
That evening, Lee Junhyeok’s classroom assessment of the two kinds of reading arrived in the notebook.
He opened notebook eighteen.
April 21, 2011. The poem. 나무.
He wrote:
Lee Junhyeok: two kinds of reading. Delivering the poem vs. reading from within the poem. He said: the difference is whether you know it with the body. The same distinction as Kim Sunhee’s body-first method. A classroom teacher using the same principle as a theater teacher without having the theater vocabulary.
He paused.
He added: Lee Junhyeok watches the children the way Kim Sunhee watches students. The receiving quality in the watching. Two different contexts, same quality of attention.
He wrote: The classroom as a training ground I didn’t anticipate. The poem required the prior receiving — the roots. I used what the training built in a non-training context for the first time since the 발표회.
He added: Park Jiyeon: we’re writing about the same tree. Different roots. She builds the roots through writing; I build through watching and training. Both methods accumulate the same thing — the prior knowing from which the expression arrives.
He paused.
He added: The classroom reading was different from the 발표회. In November 2009 I had four lines and the specific spatial grammar of the stranger and the audience’s silence as the partner. Today I had twenty-two lines of a poem and a classroom and twenty-seven classmates who were not partners. The window opened differently — not the loop, not the giving-and-receiving. The poem arriving from the roots without a partner. The monologue method. The prior receiving as the source rather than the partner’s giving.
He looked at what he had written.
He added: The two methods work separately: the partner-receiving window and the prior-receiving weight. Today the weight worked without a partner. The roots held the poem.
He closed the notebook.
Outside: the April evening, the ginkgo in its full spring green—the sixth spring at its maximum, the yellow-green of the new decision arrived and complete. The tree having made its decision and the making visible. The same decision as the five previous years and entirely different because his watching of it was different.
He thought about Lee Junhyeok’s phrase: 몸으로 안다. Knowing with the body. The phrase had been in the assignment. It was in Kim Sunhee’s training. It was in the birthday text’s description of the long watching. It was in the poem about the tree’s roots.
Everyone is saying the same thing, he thought. The theater teacher, the classroom teacher, the poet, my father.
The body’s knowing. You have to watch long enough to have it.
He turned off the desk light.
The April evening, the ginkgo’s maximum green, the city warm with the full spring.
Same thing, he thought. Everyone saying it.
He went to sleep.