9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 12 :: SARAH ROSENTHAL on HYESOON KIM
As thoughts of mortality seep ever more into my mindstream, I turn to the most fearless, honest poets and artists, those for whom the stakes are greatest. Gifted, flawed, resilient beings, bad Bodhisattvas doing all they can to serve, keeping senses wide open and finding ways to process reality through the limited apparatuses that we are, that creative works are. People who, through humble yet fierce determination, enact their visions and along the way explode every expectation.
Such a one is South Korean poet Hyesoon Kim, whose work has been translated into English by the poet Don Mee Choi and others. Translating Kim’s work from Hangul characters into English is an ambitious undertaking requiring years of patient work. Choi, who has done the lion’s share to date, has spoken at the Center for the Art of Translation about the complexities involved — the work involved in finding equivalent words and expressions that carry across Kim’s intentions and flayed sensibility.
Kim’s books ooze and spurt abject suffering from every orifice:
I’m that woman
that hideous, filthy woman
that woman, her stomach full of oblivion
that woman, her head filled with vomit
that woman, the girl passing by spits at
(Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, p. 90)
She doesn’t have to look far for the sources of this pain. The degradation and cruelty visited on women and all othered groups by those with economic, institutional, and political power give her endless material. Yet her poems do much more than splash suffering across the page. They offer a remarkable range of images and voicings, a seemingly limitless array of insights and associations.
Conventional use of language is out the window in the house Kim builds. A poem might start out tame only to quickly break out. Pronouns flop around, subject matter morphs, surreality leaps in, as if Kim is inhabiting the student who just can’t get it right. The first few lines that follow the demurely titled “Spring Rain” exhibit this derailment of propriety:
I missed my stop while thinking only of you
Please stop the bus I pressed the bell and it suddenly started to pour
The bodies of the people in the street were slanted
As I ran into the rain, I heard them scream
Talking birds stuck their heads out
From the throats of the people running
(A Drink of Red Mirror, p. 22)
The body is not only the constant subject of Kim’s poetry; it is at the core of her process. Kim has spoken about her somatic approach:
Each blotch of sensation spreads into a different pattern. Then you follow that pattern and another image blooms. There is no particular method to this, but if I had to articulate it, I could say that it is like the way a ghost speaks, the way a subject speaks after its “me” is erased.
(Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, 102)
Privileging somatic awareness instead of ego consciousness allows Kim access to dreamlike language and imagery. In the dream world her poetry inhabits, she can make contact with the deeper structural relationships between experiences that on the level of everyday awareness we tend to keep separate. Her multi-part poem “I’m OK, I’m Pig” takes the murder (mostly through burying alive) of millions of pigs and thousands of cattle in 2011 in South Korea in response to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and overlays it with corporeal suffering and corporal punishment in Christianity and Buddhism, sexual slavery in Indonesia under Japanese colonial rule, the history of torture in Korea, and much more.
Upon first encountering Kim’s work, I was intrigued and flabbergasted by the combination of somatic awareness, surreality, and extreme suffering. I have come to see how the surreality both comments on the pain (“Yes, it’s almost impossible to face — let alone keep facing — the systematic torture of every Other by those in control”) and helps me stay in contact with it by continually engaging my imagination, riveting my attention. The somatic attunement in these poems might also serve as a kind of pressure release system. The opening lines of the poem “Hole”:
A hole walked in while I was removing my makeup
I sat down on the couch and took off my pantyhose
I looked at the hole
The hole was about a meter and sixty centimeters deep
They say the hole makes good rice
There are days a baby pops out of the hole
But the hole wouldn’t even know if someone spat in it
They say even if a black cloud sits on the hole’s thighs for decades it wouldn’t care
Such a stupid thing, such a walking purgatory
(A Drink of Red Mirror, p. 39)
As strikingly abject as these lines are, there’s a marked sense of forward movement in them. They fight nothing; rather, it’s as if they relax into each next moment, each next line, as it arrives. This gives them incredible capacity to hold and work with pain, even to find humor inside the nightmare.
From “The Seoul Arts Center Outside Seoul Arts Center”:
Inside the roofs of the opera theater, moon theater, underground mini theater, concert hall, art hall the moon rises here and there and the foam of sleep overflows, the lunatics who drank the tears of the yellow moon stab each other, when the thin plastic layer is peeled off red ketchup pours out, yeah whatcha gonna do I’ve betrayed the Organization
(A Drink of Red Mirror, p. 61)
One of Kim’s volumes is titled Poor Love Machine. I find myself returning again and again to this phrase, with its suggestions of abjection, earnesty, and surreality, its seemingly endless string of connotations. How does the phrase attach itself to poetry in general? To our animal bodies, so messy and vulnerable, unlike the machines and systems we created and then position as our masters? To the mass of humanity slaving away for The Man? To the ways we love and care for one another? To the ways we fail and abandon ourselves and each other? How does the very provocation of the phrase “poor love machine,” its capacity to yield so much reflection, emblematize Kim’s project?
I think these are questions to live with. Kim’s poetry gives me the courage to do so.
Sources:
Kim, Hyesoon. A Drink of Red Mirror. Tr. Jiwon Shin, Lauren Albin, and Sue Hyon Bae. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2019.
___________. Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream. Tr. Don Mee Choi. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2014.
Park, Jong-Hyeon et al. “Control of foot-and-mouth disease during 2010–2011 epidemic, South Korea.” Emerging infectious diseases vol. 19, 4 (2013): 655–9. doi:10.3201/eid1904.121320
Sarah Rosenthal is the author of several books and chapbooks including The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (The Operating System, 2019; a collaboration with Valerie Witte) Lizard (Chax, 2016), and Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil, 2009). She edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction pieces have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her short film We Agree on the Sun premiered at the 2019 &Now Festival in Bothell, WA; the trailer is at sarahrosenthal.net/weagreeonthesun. She has done grant-supported writing residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, New York Mills, Hambidge, and This Will Take Time, and has been a Headlands Center Affiliate Artist. She lives in San Francisco where she works as a Life and Professional Coach, develops curricula for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury. More at sarahrosenthal.net.
