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an interview with
MYUNG
MI
KIM
Conducted by Lynn Keller
B
y writing in English, Myung Mi Kim composes in what is
technically her second language. Her first language was
Korean, and she did not learn English until she immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. She writes,
then, from the perspective of one who is at once an insider and an
outsider to the language and culture in which she is situated, and
this is key to both the aesthetic freshness and the political interest of
her work. In “Anacrusis,” a condensed prose statement of her poetics from 1999 (a poetics being for Kim “that activity of tending the
speculative”), she refers to herself “as a poet arrived at an uncanny
familiarity with another language—or more precisely, as a poet
transcribing the interstices of the abbreviated, the oddly conjoined,
the amalgamated—recognizing that language occurs under continual construction.”
Far more than a mere poststructuralist abstraction, Kim’s hardearned knowledge of language being under continual construction
renders language particularly malleable in her hands. In her poems,
it is subject to fracture and disruption, excision and rearrangement.
It functions not as a means of gaining an illusory stability but rather
as a register of the often jarring instability of human experience in
time, and of the stumblings, the incoherencies, the polyphonic complexity of the immigrant’s experience in and between several cultures. The space of the page is equally subject to disruption and
improvisation: Kim plays sometimes with textual arrangements
reminiscent of traditional stanzaic structures and more often with
forms that register visually her dislocation of words and fracturing
Contemporary Literature XLIX, 3
0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/08/0003-0335
© 2008 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
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of syntax, her shifts from one language or one kind of linguistic
transcription into another, her consciousness of the forced displacement of populations around the globe. Even marks of punctuation
are often deployed unconventionally, so as to challenge the ways in
which authority and convention suppress potential for change. To
quote Kim again from “Anacrusis,” her poetry is “A valence of first
and further tongues. A fluctuating topography, a ringing of verve or
nerve—transpiring. Elements of the lyric and its mediations. The
duration of the now, the now occurring, that is necessarily expressive of a time before. Differentiation as it negotiates complications
of temporality.” As Kim’s mention of a “now” expressive of a past
time suggests, her work often alludes to history. Yet its primary
direction is toward the future, its ultimate aim being to contribute
to developing a future society with a more ethical relation to the
planet’s biological and human diversity.
Of her four volumes to date, Myung Mi Kim’s first collection,
Under Flag (Kelsey Street, winner of the 1991 Multicultural
Publishers Book Award), is most clearly focused on immigrant experience. Perhaps alluding grimly to the Pledge of Allegiance’s “one
nation, under God,” its title sets the stage for poems that address the
suffering of the deracinated—especially evacuees displaced by
war—the struggles of those who have to cross linguistic as well as
national borders, who must deal with the losses inherent in diaspora
and the uncertainties of “who is mother tongue, who is father country?” In her subsequent books—The Bounty (Chax, 1996), Dura (Sun
& Moon, 1998), and Commons (University of California, 2002)—the
poems grow longer, while the linguistic units within them are often
shorter, their references more elusive. The preoccupations of the
poems within each collection interweave as Kim continues to
explore in very different textual formats and through different lenses
the effects of colonialism and war, the dynamics of families and communities under duress, the movement between and among languages, cultures, and nations. Only weeks before the following
conversation took place, Michael Cross’s Atticus Finch Press, located
in Buffalo, New York, released Kim’s elegant chapbook, River Antes,
printed with distinctive foldout triptych pages. “River Antes” will be
part of her forthcoming book, Penury.
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The powerful combination in Kim’s work of startling motion with a
highly principled focus of concern—its creation of a coherent structure
that is nonetheless always shifting, always provisional—is more readily experienced than described. But its nature may be suggested by a
brief characterization of the eleven-page poem “Hummingbird” from
Dura. Perhaps in homage to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, the
poem begins with a translation exercise, in which the sentences to be
translated reveal a regulated culture where much is prescribed: “2.
Wear a red scarf while grinding grains. / . . . 4. On the eighth day of the
third month count your barrels.” Concern with linguistic imperatives
and other cultural/linguistic constructions moves easily into concern
with their counterpart, expressive options: “Modulation, raising,
slackening of the voice,” or “In this place which we translated curving
and bridling / we can say also curving and frisking.” The hummingbird
enters the disjunctive fabric of this text both as a real biological creature—“Primary fact] [migratory”—and as an emblem for the transcendence of limits. At once categorizable and entirely beyond
received categories, this bird is a model for Kim’s ideal poem—a material/immaterial, potentially transformative entity whose erratic path
and unexpected music may present options outside given categories.
The bird “happens as a sound first”; its size escapes language; its
speed is unmatched. Although its flight takes in the world’s more disheartening and gruesome phenomena—“[bloody mess of the city”—
in this particular journey Kim highlights the interestingly and
metaphorically named wildflowers, shrubs, and trees on its route—
“thistle / monkey flower / cow’s parsnip / scotch broom / horse
chestnut.” Its movement is “Meandering neither abject nor low”; as an
ethical principle, every “Letter, syllable, and word model[s] plurality.”
Myung Mi Kim was born in December 1957 in Seoul; her family
moved to the U.S. in 1967. After attending Oberlin College, Kim
received an MA in English from Johns Hopkins University and an
MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her son
Matthew was born in 1989. She served as guest editor for the feminist experimental journal HOW(ever) from 1990 to 1992, and she
taught in the creative writing program at San Francisco State
University from 1991 to 2002. In 2003 she joined the faculty of the
poetics program at SUNY-Buffalo.
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Thanks to Michael Basinski, this interview was conducted in the
Special Collections room of the SUNY-Buffalo library in the late
afternoon of October 12, 2006. Our time was short, as a freak early
snowstorm was fast dropping several feet of wet snow, shutting
down the city.
Q. A lot of your work seems to me to explore the interrelations
of capitalism, militarism, and imperialism. That large area of
inquiry could be explored in lots of nonfictional and fictional genres. So I’m wondering, can poetry achieve something different in
such an exploration than could be achieved in the essay, the
novel, the sociological study? What is poetry’s particular gift for
that exploration?
A. In the work of poetry, as I see it, there is a formal bearing—
formal thinking, form as thinking—a thinking toward what doesn’t
already exist. Poetry is a site of unnaming, so that a certain relationship to perception itself opens up, and the problems of capitalism,
militarism, imperialism can, in fact, be engaged.
Q. So that with poetry the problems can be reconceived in some
way.
A. Absolutely. The problems themselves are always recurring, and
they’re also always suddenly emerging. The problem of the category of the problem is thrown into relief. The question of the question of “capitalism,” “militarism,” “imperialism,” and so on, is
proliferated. Poetry, for me, unbounds knowledge from Fact, Truth,
or final articulation. What I am calling poetry’s “formal thinking”—
formal forbearance, almost—is the site of the consideration-neverholding-steady.
Q. “Forbearance” is a fascinating word to use there. It conveys a
restraint, a holding back.
A. I think “forbearance” suggests the interval or lag between any
act of attention, any mode of looking, listening, hearing, let alone
speaking—and where there is almost nothing. I’m wondering about
forbearance in relation to the suddenly emergent—forbearance as
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the porous condition of knowledge production, recognition, attention before it forecloses itself.
Q. So there’s an openness in the exploration enabled by poetry
that you don’t see in these other genres.
A. Or, poetry continually probes and refunctions conceptions of
“openness.”
Q. In your published talk “Anacrusis,” you say that a talk cannot
proceed by argument, but rather that it proceeds by enactment.
Your sense of poetry is very bound up in this notion of enactment as
well, isn’t it?
A.
Yes, because it doesn’t exist previous to the event of making.
Q. When you start a poem, what do you start with? A question, a
preoccupation, an image?
A. These days I rarely think about writing “a poem.” That notion
of “poem” was probably more actively at play in my early work.
Q. So how did you start a poem when you were writing your first
book, Under Flag? What was your process then, and what is it now?
A. Probably the biggest difference in process from Under Flag to
my subsequent books deals precisely with this question of “a poem”
as a discrete, individual body, written as such—I mean with its occasion, matter, form all working as one, compared to a sense of the
poem as an open continuum, something that is presenced through a
process of accretion. Each poem in Under Flag was written more or
less “in order.” In other words, the “compositional time” in the
poem is a single, uninterrupted arc. In subsequent work, “compositional time” is undecidable, multiple. To go back to your opening
question, in Under Flag, the writing process itself engages issues of
capitalism, militarism, and imperialism as if they are “localizable.”
But the more I wrote into questions of memory, collective memory,
linguistic oppression, the violence of militarism on human bodies,
and the responsibility of historical consciousness—it was less and
less possible to localize, that is, to give any one shape, occasion, or
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order to the ongoing problem of rethinking poetry at the conjunction
of cultural history and the everyday. Everything erupted. Now writing is much more of a notational process, working through accretion
and sedimentation of material. Poems are continually under construction—in motion—and, again, there’s that sense of what’s suddenly emerging. As material accrues over time, I’m listening to the
repercussions, emendations, refractions, and elaborations produced
by the proximity of these formal, aural, graphic, and prosodical elements to begin to understand what may be the “poem” or the
“book.” It sounds like I’m talking about absence, a writing in terms
of what isn’t there, but this is an absence replete with possibility—
not absence predicated by lack.
Q. So your more recent compositional process arises out of a kind
of plentitude. And am I right that the motion you speak of partly
involves your literal mode of composing and revising a text, in that
pieces of text are actually moving through the “poem” as you
rework it?
A. Yes. I often work on the floor spreading out “parts” of a manuscript—walking in and among fragments—although “fragment” is
a problematic word.
Q.
Because it suggests a missing whole.
A. Yes. For me the fragment is something already imbued with its
own integrity—historical, material, acoustic, and so on. This coincides with my sense of the mobility and plasticity of language, bits
of language coming together in ways that cannot be estimated,
guessed at. But I would also suggest that this doesn’t yield an infinite rehearsal preventing one from speaking of “the poem”—rather,
that it releases a kind of totality that is not closed.
Q. Do you have a clear sense of when you are done with a particular poem (if I may use that generic label)?
A. Yes, but not in terms of coalescence or unity, more along the
lines of what I was just talking about, where the elements—the
affective, the intellectual, the musical, the formal, and so on—not so
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much coalesce into a totality but rather keep generating, reconfiguring a series of correspondences and relations.
Q.
So you feel the poem has reached its potential?
A. Yes, but not that there is an arrival. There’s no progression
toward an objective, but a sense that all the possible permutations
have been felt.
Q. And how do the visual aspects of the poem play into that? As
you have the pieces on the floor and you’re arranging the text, at
what point do you discover the visual form that a particular section
is going to have?
A. I work from both ends. That is to say, sometimes the form is
something that you see only after you have all the elements, all the
parts, all the bits of language. Other times, I start with an inherent
sense of what the formal investigations will be for a certain section
of a book, if not for the book as a whole.
Q. And is that because of the nature of the material you’re
addressing? What makes that form? What makes that clear?
A. It feels like a physiological event; it’s not simply content that
prompts the formal inquiry. I often have sketches in my notebooks of formal shapes, formal possibilities outside language as
such.
Q. And as far as you recognize, those forms don’t necessarily possess a particular emotional quality or carry a set of associations?
Let’s consider as a specific example the title poem of The Bounty.
Section 2 has visually regular pages of three three-line stanzas reminiscent of Wallace Stevens; these are followed in section 3 by a set of
pages with columns of single words on each side sandwiching
longer lines in between. Counting reveals that there are nine poems
in each section, and they all have nine lines.
A. In The Bounty I was rehearsing notions and complications of three.
The tercets are one obvious manifestation—or the three “columns,” or
sections composed of multiples of three, as you point out.
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And what made you interested in three?
A. One way to answer that would be to mention that much of
The Bounty was written right after my son was born. I was drawn to
the convolutions of one and then two becoming three, whatever that
might pan out to be.
Q. That makes a lot of sense. It ties to the book’s sense of the
bounty of the mother, the bounty that’s required of the mother.
A. That bounty is completely double, since it is, in one sense,
being demanded.
Q.
And it’s also what’s being given.
A. Exactly. There’s the anguish—an exquisite sense of the conjunction of plenty, and wanting to provide plenty, and, in fact, of being
plenty, which is counterposed (indirectly, of course) with emptying
out. The question of “Is there plenty?”
Q.
The threat of privation.
A.
“Will there be plenty?”
Q.
And there hasn’t always been plenty.
A. That points to the overlays—the mental, emotive, and psychic
space in which one’s family of origin crosses with whatever families
we make and build otherwise.
Q. I’m intrigued also because number is something that comes
into your work frequently. In the “Lamenta” section of Commons it’s
a cycle of nineteen that intrigued you. I’d never heard of the
Metonic cycle before. Is it associated with a particular culture?
A. I’m not sure how to answer that question. I was drawn to the
idea of the Metonic cycle, named after the Athenian Meton, who
articulated a cycle of nineteen years. But I should add immediately
that it’s not the precise or actual definition of the Metonic cycle that
enters into Commons, but rather the opening it makes available
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as I wander among possibilities for rendering temporality and
historical consciousness.
Q. In Commons you begin sections with what looks like a span of
numbers—say, 229 written above 318, or 406 appearing above 424.
The numerical headings of the pages that follow are within those
number spans. But the spans are not necessarily in groups of nineteen or anything like that, are they?
A. I think they might have wanted to be, in terms of a compositional procedure that I gave myself. But the transformation, the
transgression of or by the procedure as such, is precisely what is
useful in a “chronicling” that is not . . .
Q.
Linear.
A.
Precisely.
Q. One of the things that interests me about Commons is that there
seems to be a kind of documentary impulse here that I hadn’t seen
anywhere else in your work. It’s particularly evident in the sections
of “Lamenta” that you title “Vocalise.” I’m curious about the title
and the decision to include these. They’re all about dissection and
vivisection, aren’t they?
A. The “Vocalise” sections in Commons stem from one of my reading projects in the codification of Western sciences and in particular
the field of anatomy.
Q.
And often female anatomy.
A. Exactly. What is the mapping/invasion committed on female
bodies, female subjects, and how does this coincide with discourses
of imperialism?
Q. Was this a conscious move—“Now I’d like to include documentation of that other way of organizing material”?
A. I think the impulse to document isn’t necessarily concerned
with a question of method or a conscious effort to introduce the
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Figure 1
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document as artifact. It reflects a different set of concerns about the
possibility and difficulty of opening up an experience of time commensurate to an experience of history. Documents evoke the possibility of encounter.
Q. You want the documentary object here so that the poem
includes the language in which this knowledge was processed in
the document’s context; you want the effect of a document’s textual
evidence.
A. Yes, and when I include the document in my own composition,
the ways in which it continues to work on me may be activated in
the poem itself.
Q. I’d like to return to considering some of the visual dimensions
of your work, because it seems to me that this is a moment of a great
deal of visual exploration of page space, particularly by women
poets. I don’t know if you’d agree that it seems to be particularly
women who are doing a lot of this. I’m very interested in why that
would be happening, and I’m also very interested in how you think
about the visual elements in your poetry. You make tremendously
varied use of page space, and there are lots of graphic or typographic visual elements. I’m thinking, for instance, of pages 82 and
83 of Commons [Fig. 1], where you have these unusual punctuation
marks—tracks, boundaries, fence lines, whatever they are. And
then you have Korean characters in—is it your own script?
A. It is. That’s an interesting story in itself: I always assumed that
the Korean text would be “typed” during the design/typesetting
process for Commons. I had no intention of including my own permanently frozen, childish, Korean handwriting.
Q.
It’s Hangul, right?
A. Right—I then began to realize that this “bad handwriting,” the
materiality of it, might be necessary to include, precisely because
whether or not one has any relation to Hangul, this page is readable/legible, in a way that it wouldn’t have been had it been presented in “regularized” type.
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Q. Could I digress for a moment from the topic of visual elements
to ask about this Olga Kim, perhaps an exile in Siberia, whose words
you are transcribing on that page? Who is she, and does she belong
to a particular historical moment in Korean history?
A. Olga Kim is a construction. She is an allegorical figure inflecting the ways in which the Korean diaspora has taken place globally.
There’s something particularly compelling about the displacement
of Koreans to places like Russia. Unraveling the particular political
paths that produce that specific migration or diaspora was of some
interest to me. But she stands in as an allegorical figure for Korean
migrations and diaspora of all kinds.
But to return to your question about visual treatments, or visual . . .
Q.
Yes, these visual elements.
A. Again, I’m always going back to that space of perception, or cognition, or recognition, or articulation, on the one hand, and on the
other hand, a space where in fact there’s almost nothing—this is
where we began our conversation—with the notion of “forbearance.”
Formal or visual elements become interlocutors of this difficulty.
Visual and spatial treatments negotiate not only what is eroded but
also that which is under an imposition of erasure. Working both these
sites throws a different kind of light on what remains, what emanates.
Q. Talk to me, if you would, about the long, horizontal double
lines on page 82—parallel lines of varying length that sometimes
constitute the entire line of “text” and sometimes come before or
after a word or two. Do they signify imposed erasure? Or would
that be reading the marks too literally and mechanically?
A. As you point out, the “horizontal double lines” activate an erasure, in part to address the question of “imposed erasure”: what
motivates the social and political practices that maintain, enforce,
authorize certain public “records” and not others? But what I’m also
hoping to evoke is an awareness of the irrevocable.
Q. In the middle of that page, you use the word atomize, “being
atomized.” That’s part of what has happened to this text, isn’t it?
Especially these documents—they have been reduced to particles.
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The term also brings to mind the atom bomb, and that kind of violent destruction as well.
In all your work, visual elements have formal importance, but the
volume where they seem most central is your newest production,
the extraordinarily beautiful River Antes from Atticus Finch Press.
Here you have, among other striking visual devices, an unusual
setup of three-part pages that literally unfold. Were they three parts
before this work went to production?
A. Yes, I was thinking through that formal possibility from the
very beginning of the project. I feel very lucky to have had the
chance to see this poem printed as I’d envisioned it. Is it possible to
read those three parts as one page, for example? Is it possible to read
them in both directions? Left to right, right to left?
Q. And you can fold the pages differently; they can fold around
other pages.
A. Exactly—the effusion and extension of recombinatory meaning. The mobility of the pages reworks triptych, scroll, illuminated
page, and so on. I was attempting to create a context in which conventions of reading, conventions of printing, and cultural bases of
reading practices could interrogate each other.
Q. Now what about the pages in River Antes without verbal text on
which appear what on the keyboard we would call forward slashes
and periods? Weaving through the triptychs you have a pattern of
pages that are mostly blank with a few large marks at the bottom
right, but you also have a whole page in the middle of a fold with
nothing but these slash marks and periods [Fig. 2], and elsewhere
you make use of single and double vertical lines. What does this
unconventional use of punctuation convey for you? What was your
interest in using these marks?
A. These marks (for me, graphic and aural) are operating under a
condition in which there is no identifiable language, no systematic
syntax, but there are sonic or rhythmic values. Transcribing, as writing as listening as hearing as speaking, without the normative constraints of language. This ties back to your earlier question about the
role of visually innovative work: the “visual” perhaps performs
something that language itself may not be able to perform.
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Figure 2
Q. When you read River Antes out loud and you come to one of the
pages that has only the graphic marks on it, is there a sound?
A. Yes there is, but I don’t know if I can give it any vocal quality.
It’s [she taps out a rhythm on the table].
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Oh, it’s a rhythm. I see.
A. Yes, these different values are being related to each other, so
that the single line with a dot is a different kind of rhythmic value,
and the double lines are an acceleration. However, this is not only
rhythm, per se, since I also hear an attendant melody or, at least,
pitches or intonations—note the shifting positioning of the marks
on each “line.” My question is, how would it be possible to render
rhythm, word, syntax, pitch, graphic presentation, and so on without deciding, this is a rhythm, this is a word, this is not a word, this
is only a graphic, and so on. This passage rotates in and among and
unsettles those categories by which we participate in sense-making.
By extension, I’m testing how intelligibility is conceptualized and
maintained socially, culturally, and politically—how this motivates
constructions of social affiliation and disaffiliation. The “visually
innovative,” for me, is a form of investigation that doesn’t proceed
from opposition.
Q.
Opposition is too binary.
A. Exactly. I’m wondering how to be ever more vigilant about the
process of tending to difference, alterity.
Q. You end River Antes with something else that intrigues me.
You end with the carnage left behind, and you end with nature:
“humpspine blackened with flies.” There’s a pastoral element in
this image that I see recurring in your work. And I’m curious
whether this resonates for you. You do seem to me repeatedly to
introduce the way in which nature endures beyond human devastation, so that you have several images like that one at the end of
River Antes where flies appear on bones. For instance, there’s
another passage in River Antes where grass grows from a skeleton
after you have been suggesting numerous military acts of
grotesque aggression. Then there are places where you take pleasure in naming particular plants—alyssum, horsetail, jonquils, fiddlehead, and the like—or where you convey a groundedness in the
soil and the pleasure of working or touching the soil. I’m thinking,
for instance, of a passage from Dura: “Trace of timber in a gravelly
loam, / part of a collapsed fence. / Affection to touch dirt. / All
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harmonics sound” ( 85). One of my favorite sections of Dura is
“Hummingbird,” in which the hummingbird is, as I read it, this
wondrous embodiment that is beyond language. I associate your
invocation of nature with the pastoral partly because it seems
sometimes to have a nostalgic quality, in that it seems to be associated with earlier social formations and with more rural and peasant forms of life. Could you talk about that?
A. I think you’re right about the sense of what endures beyond
any one human lifetime or even multiple generations of human
time—that aspect of the temporal that operates on a different scale,
perhaps a geological time. Maybe the issue isn’t necessarily that
nature endures beyond human devastation, but what are the ways
in which the human can be practiced beyond categories of nation,
soil, blood, and identity produced by one particular moment in
time, coeval with multiple sites of the human across wide arcs of
time? How do nature and human belong to each other? In this
sense, the presence of “earlier social formations” in my work, as you
suggest, registers what has devolved in basic social formations that
connect one human to another. I’d want to be careful here to distinguish how we’re using the notion of nostalgia. I would worry if, for
example, nostalgia is formulated as a longing to recuperate, or if it
proceeds from the understanding that the past is replete in a way
the present moment is not. I would be troubled by nostalgia practiced as a restorative force—as if there ever was a transparent,
unconflicted scene of belonging or kinship. I hope what I’m
attempting in my writing is a process of historicizing how we’ve
ended up in this cultural moment—the utter sense of isolation pervading human activity. I’m hoping to open up notions of care,
regard, what it might mean to be thoughtful, full of thought toward
one another.
I think the problems of nostalgia are particularly complicated by
what I would call my “golden childhood,” strangely and wonderfully truncated and overly real in a place that I left, that does and cannot exist—not to mention that I was the youngest in my family.
Q.
The youngest of how many children?
A.
Four. Here we go back to that sense of plenty.
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The positive side of bounty—
A. That raises the immediate challenge of the potential problem of
nostalgia. What has to be examined is precisely this question: are
you reprising loss, or are you furthering, producing a reading of
loss? It’s a slippery thing. But isn’t that part of why one makes art—
because the difficulty won’t go away? The difficulty of discerning—
am I reproducing nostalgia? What if I am constructing something in
a spirit of recuperation that’s not useful beyond its own circumscribed activity? Or is there an active mobilizing of historical thinking and being?
Q. Do you find that you carry forward into your own present
life—and not just in your poetry—some of those traits of that more
communal culture that you associate with your childhood? Is that
something you find yourself working for?
A. Yes, and I think this is one of the hardest tasks, really. Beyond
one’s family of origin, the possible locations for furthering kinship
as you go through different phases of your life become much more
elusive.
Q. You came to Buffalo from the Bay Area, which has in recent
decades been mythologized as a place of strong poetic communities. Did you find that sense of communal culture to be only mythic
or real?
A. I think the idea of a “communal culture” operates in the interstices of the mythic and the real simultaneously. In the good decade
I spent in the Bay Area, what felt most vibrant to me was the feeling of
participating in a poetic community devoted to opening up the activity of poetry, poetry’s range of work. Publishing, editing, curating
readings jostled and resonated off of each other—adumbrating usefully the complexity of rethinking poetry and it possibilities. After a
few years away from the Bay Area, I’m realizing that the time I spent
in that poetic community allowed me to review, ponder, recontextualize certain moments in twentieth-century American poetry and poetics. Here, I’m aware of my reframing of the Berkeley/San Francisco
Renaissance, for example—or of the need to introduce new modes of
tracking innovative practices by women since 1945.
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Q. Do you think of your work as coming out of a lineage that
includes Language writing, or do you even think about positioning
your work in relation to recent movements or trends?
A. To some degree, as I’ve been trying to express, poetry for me
resides in the space of the “unpositioned”—the as-yet-unavailable
to culture—so I’m not rehearsing in my own head how my work is
positioned in relation to recent movements and so on, in any direct
way. Yet it’s part of the task of the poet to be attendant to those aesthetic prompts and precedents that are in fact figured/embedded in
one’s work. In large strokes, what might be useful to mention here is
the companionship I find in the writing and poetics proposed by
those poets referred to as the Objectivists.
Q. Elsewhere you have mentioned the significance of Oppen’s
work for you.
A. George Oppen remains a vital figure for my work and my
thinking. His sense of the materiality of history—transposed, transformed, or actuated in the confluence of sense and silence—is
evocative. His struggle with the singular, the collective, the problems of the singular and the collective continues to be instructive to
me. And further, I would mention the context of my work in conjunction with experimental women’s poetry at large, more than
locating my work within Language poetry as such—although of
course these are related spheres.
Q.
Yes, but they are also distinguishable, if overlapping, spheres.
A. Yes, and I would propose that what is informing women’s
innovative practices, especially what we have been referring to as
the “visual” in our exchange today, needs to be further examined.
Q.
Because there are so many dimensions of the visuality?
A. Because radical formal practices by women expose, challenge,
and test new modes of rendering temporality.
Q.
The visual manifestation is secondary, in a sense?
A. Not secondary—neither prominent nor evacuated. I’m suggesting that the “visual” element is one of many possible ways in
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which to track the ontological questions being posed by formally
radical practices by women to notate being and becoming.
Q. One of the things that may still need further examination is
silence. We associate silence with blank space, and as has often been
acknowledged, silence is something that is very charged for
women. Silence can be imposed, or silence can be chosen, and it can
speak. A concern with silences underlies some of this experimentation with the blank space on the page.
A. Yes, silence as an uncodified duration of iteration. In presencing silence, rupture, or gap, the what-is-not-there, I hope we continue to reconceptualize how not to turn discourse into more
discourse—creating a space in which a possible communication of
communication, if you will, takes place. Silence carries the radical
potential that I might be able to speak to you and may be able to
evoke something that has been unavailable to both of us. And how
is that silence, or the “irruptive,” an occasion for bringing along
those things that have no systematic reference . . .
Q.
So it would be a medium of translation in some way.
A. This is hard to talk about. I’m not speaking about a prelinguistic
space. I’m trying to evoke the space of utterance, perception, before
categorization appears, which is the generative power of silence.
Q. Which is what the visual can be. Which is why the unpacking is
necessary.
I’d like to get some basic information about your biography. If
you don’t mind saying, I’d like to hear whether there were political
reasons for your leaving Korea. I’d like to hear a bit about that and
about your family. Earlier you referred to your “golden” childhood
in Korea. You lived in the city?
A.
I was born in Seoul.
Q.
And what did your parents do?
A. My father was an MD—an otolaryngologist. After my three
older siblings were born, he spent a number of years in America pursuing the latest developments in his specialty. My poor mother . . .
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Q. Yes, really. So she had three small children? Did she have a
community to support her?
A. Yes. Meanwhile, my father, after his training in the U.S., came
back to Korea to set up a successful, highly visible practice. I think
he always intended to bring the entire family back to the U.S., but
certainly some of the political unrest of the late 1960s in Korea made
this more urgent.
Q. So it was just your nuclear family—your parents and the
four children—who came to the United States. In what year was
that?
A. 1967. I was nine, which gave me just long enough to have a
strong sense, in an innate way, of the culture, the language of Korea.
Q. Yet you were still within the period that linguists think of as
when one can easily learn another language thoroughly.
A. Yes, I understand that period lasts until you’re about twelve. If
you listen to all my siblings, you can definitely tell our birth order—
the younger you are, the less accent you have, and so on.
Q. And then not long after you arrived in this country your father
died, is that correct?
A. Very suddenly, in a car accident, when I was fourteen. So, what
you have to try to imagine is . . .
Q.
You had just gone through this huge rupture.
A. These two life-altering moments occurred essentially right on
top of each other.
Q.
Terrible.
A. Not only was there this question of crossing, moving through,
being morphed by cultural, historical, and linguistic demands, but
also the death of my father. Mourning isn’t something you complete. You must be alert to it again and again in different formulations. If mourning is kept in a single, unitary trajectory, as one
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activity addressing one loss, this precludes the labor of mourning as
viability. This is what I’ve been trying to say today about poetry as
the generative. It’s not absent absence, if you will.
Q. As another trajectory of loss and mourning, you have had the
experience of moving from one language to another, essentially
leaving behind your first language. Rosmarie Waldrop has written
about how that kind of experience shaped her work (though she
was older and didn’t lose German to the extent that you lost
Korean)—her being able to approach English as an insider in terms
of the extent of her mastery, but also not being an insider, being distanced from the language she writes in because it was not her first
language.
A. I think that’s an accurate description of my experience as well.
That inclusion and repulsion from “mastery” is a condition I recognize implicitly. When you move through this predicament, you
begin to realize that language is very plastic. Language is a social
practice rather than any sort of intractable given, and once that rift
enters your consciousness, it allows you to have an interrogative
relationship to language. You have questions about what language
is, what it performs, what it means to get recognized as a speaker of
a particular language. This reflexivity prepares you to be an acute
listener. This transitive space is a translative space—both linguistically and, I think, in terms of the person, the subject, if not spirit.
This opens up multiplicity, plurality, in social and personal conceptions of language.
Q. Do you think that that movement from one language to another
made you into a poet, made you choose to be a poet?
A. Yes, absolutely. That question is a useful loop back, isn’t it, to
your initial question about “why poetry”? What does poetry
make available? Poetry invites a practice of language/perception
that embraces mutability, undecidability, the motion underneath
and around what’s codified in conventions of language, grammar, syntax, semantics, and so forth. Poetry produces new ways
of participating in perception, thinking, historical being and
becoming.
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To keep that plasticity evident and operating.
A. I think this is why we’ve been talking today about the
“visual,” because the visual is one sort of access to the question of
materiality as a question of form, as a question of consciousness, as
a question of history—the unnameable; it’s not a question of being
between languages, or being in languages. This is where conventional understandings of being bilingual or multilingual are not
useful because they keep reproducing the idea that “language” can
be somehow “counted” or autonomously performed. Language is
on the roam, as particles of sound, as unmoored particles of meanings. And the way that they congregate and call to each other, follow in and reformulate, is a way of being in the world, is a way of
being in attendance.