The Line in the Sand, KSP Guest Blogger Michelle Puckett on Myung Mi Kim
In honor of KSP’s recent reprint of a Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag, I am posting part of a paper on Kim’s later work, Commons (University of California Press, 2002).
It was sent to us by current Mills College MFA student Michelle Puckett. To read the rest of the discussion, please email me. Michelle has a BA from Naropa and you can find some of her poems in BANG OUT.
The Line in the Sand: The Question of Engagement in Myung Mi Kim’s Commons
“The transition from the stability and absoluteness of the world’s contents/ to their dissolution into motions and relations” from Commons, Myung Mi Kim (13)
Myung Mi Kim has undertaken a monumental task in her fourth book of poetry, Commons, a task that takes her away from the fixed world, into a mutable one. The reader is confronted with the world in dissolution. Highly influenced by the Korean War and her experience of language loss upon immigrating to the United States, the text highlights the process of decomposition that we, in some sense, disregard each day as we seek solid ground from which to complete the living of our lives. Kim interrogates that turning away and offers an alternative that is both a powerful critique of militaristic hegemony and a sober call for radical empathy. The resultant work is heavy with images of boundary, loss, and fragment, upon which Kim begins to speak a fractured language that is unequivocally new. By moving away from language as it is commonly used, she invites new perspectives while risking confounding the masses. The question of “understanding” becomes one of positioning. The very act of reading is interrogated by her ability to highlight the nature of words as emblematic of social difference – an aggregation of increasingly particularized symbols. She ponders how it, “might…be possible to render the infinitesimally divisible moment” (108). Kim makes her attempt by melding and severing words, characters, and utterances to perform a polyglossic landscape, at once impenetrable and simultaneously super-permeable.
According to a lecture given at Mills College by the poet Truong Tran, Commons, “draws a line in the sand and says you can’t come over here”. And while I agree with Tran’s assessment, I also wonder what the implications of that “line” are. After all, Kim did write the book, promote it, and publish it for the world to see. I am not convinced that she is literally trying to be unwelcoming by drawing that line, though she does not allow the reader to enter blithely. To be sure, there is a strong sense of boundary in the poems in Commons and Kim is not shy to resist consumptive attitudes of privilege by asserting the dignity and righteous privacy of marginalized communities. Still, it is incumbent upon the reader to explore in what ways she may engage with this proverbial “line in the sand” other than by making the tired decision to enact traditional “us and them” behaviors. And while some may perceive the door to this work as being aggressively private or sealed shut, I argue that Commons offers a world of fantastic empathy and possibility for those willing to engage in multiple ways with the unfamiliar, despite, and perhaps especially, in light of the presence of boundary.
In 2007, Myung Mi Kim participated in a discussion with University of Pennsylvania students for PennSound in which a student asked what she hoped the reaction to her work would be from a reader who encounters it with no prior knowledge of the Korean language. Should the reader, for example, try to find commonality between the languages, or should she feel playful or averse to the unfamiliar characters? Kim answers that she is “delighted” with these questions and that she “cannot imagine anything more fruitful than aversion and play as a means of staging the question of commonality” (PennSound). After all, commonality is the basis upon which we agree on the terms of language in order to make meaning. Play is often central to poetic use of language as seen in devices such as rhyme and assonance. And within aversion itself, Kim argues, there is, “revolution, evolution, the turning away, the motion of it, is instructive. Something is happening there…the turning away is part of reading” (PennSound).
It seems that engagement itself is what is at the core of Kim’s concern with language. The mode one uses as the vehicle for engagement, she insists, co-creates the meaning of a given work. And, being invested in multiplicity and that which is particular, she maintains that the onus of meaning is shared between the author and her reader. The very last line of the book tells her desire “To mobilize the notion of our responsibility to one another in social space” (111). It is not insignificant that Kim uses the word “mobilize” here because she is pointing to a possible reality in which our conceptions of community and of our responsibilities to one another are capable of movement. Her intention is not necessarily to simply reform our poor notions into better, more accurate ones, but rather to inculcate motion as the very mode of virtuous relation within groups. Kim, consequently, has a radical need for the participation of “the other” with her work.
While not overly sentimental toward her reader, Kim is nonetheless hospitable. Her language is profoundly egalitarian, for the experiment she is invested in is one that requires as many participants as possible. The price of admission can be steep, however, for the privileged in Kim’s poetic land where “freedom from commerce was a cry” (77) and the work required is performed by “neither slaves nor freemen, but [those] who have become part of the soil upon which they work/ like so many cows and the trees” (89). The implication here is that the true work to be done is tethered not to commercial exploits which emphasize and uphold master/slave narratives, but rather that it demands work performed in a way that celebrates the mutuality of interdependence. Again, we see Kim’s notorious ability to turn our attention to the role of the reader in making meaning. There is no single interpretation of a text that may be handed to a reader. In fact, Kim has posited instead, “a poetics – as that activity of tending the speculative” (Anacrusis). She invites the reader to enter into a space of conjecture in which engagement with incomplete knowledge (the fragment) becomes the basis of her poetic endeavor.
February 7, 2009
Vertical Answers in the Classroom, KSP Guest Blogger Stephanie Young
The following appears in a forthcoming anthology on teaching poetry, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
some thinking
500-1000 words, more or less, to say something about teaching poetry, feels like an appropriate restriction—not unlike the restriction of semester and quarter units, class meeting times, the space of a classroom, institutions. Which is to say something about the context I’m speaking from: I teach one undergraduate poetry workshop a semester (“beginning” and “advanced”, in rotation) at an institution where I also work full-time as an administrator for a large (100 student) graduate creative writing program. And so I think a lot about the workshop model across various and fairly specific contexts; about the problems and possibilities of the workshop as a space for thinking in groups. What is a workshop for? And what can it do?
I’ve become increasingly interested in the ways a workshop may function as a provisional, immediate community, where some relationships dissolve when the container of the class dissolves, and others persist. This feels both like and unlike the poetry communities I’m a member of. I tend to work with other people, and often come into brief but intense relationships within the frame of collaboration around a performance or event. Some of those projects grow into long-term creative partnerships. But there’s also a myriad of less easily categorized ways wherein almost everything I write is in some way responding or thinking through the conversations and relationships of local, national, online and international poetry communities as I experience them.
I don’t have room here to sufficiently problematize some of the terms I’m using, “community” in particular, which in the bay area, a location central to my thinking and experience, is decidedly plural, overlapping, contestatory. And while there exist all kinds of bridges and pipes and paths between poetry classrooms and poetry communities (a permeability that comes with its own set of problems and possibilities), finally the space of the classroom isn’t equivalent to that of the writing community, the latter of which so often plays out at public and private readings, in galleries, bars, homes. The compare and contrast possibilities here are many: the writing scene with its deeply messy, engaged friendships and sex (I’m thinking of a lyric from Penelope Houston: “where everyone in the room must be once or future lovers”), but also the poetry scene’s confusing, uninvestigated social relations and power differentials, administered by a multitude of institutions and yet often claiming non-institutional status. In contrast, the classroom comes equipped with an entire exoskeleton of visible hierarchies (teacher/student, beginning/advanced, etc.) and calcified taxonomies, policing and further producing everything from genre to market to canon.
Still, the writing workshop can do some things a writing community can’t, namely, it can require things of its members: that they show up regularly, read, write, and commit to speaking together about one another’s writing for a pre-determined set of time. Sometimes these requirements, a certain model for community, do actually generate networks of response and engagement in the class. Sometimes they don’t. Classes don’t always “work”.
Other things the workshop can do: actively think about things like genre and markets, make some arguments around these things visible, maybe even de-naturalize the trajectory of undergraduate creative writing major to MFA to contest submissions. Thus, part of what I try to do in the workshop is make many kinds of contemporary writing visible, especially conversations between contemporary writers (whether framed as such or those which unfold in the space of poetry) but also the means of production that generate and make that work available, the gift economies and often relational milieu which contemporary work emerges out of, and into.
And I also try to construct a set of conditions that foster thinking through a field of questions or concerns together as a class. In constructing a class (the texts we’ll read together, the order in which we’ll read them, and some usually formal prompts that might be paired with reading,) I try to maintain tension between a field of inquiry constrained enough to focus the group’s conversation, and wide enough that individuals can continue whatever it is they came into class working on. (I should say that I’m talking here about the “advanced” workshop I teach, which I have so far taken apart and re-constructed every time I teach it.)
I put a lot of work into constructing the container, and in the best cases it’s something I hand off to the group at the beginning of the semester. And then I’m a member of the group and we mess around with this container together, and in this way I learn a lot about the structure I’ve made, the questions or concerns I was trying to surface.
some practice
Last summer Amber di Pietra, a bay area poet and Kelsey St. Press editor/member, posted a proposal/project on the Kelsey St. Blog: “Send Us Your Vertical Answers.”[i]
The premise: “In the years since Vertical Interrogation for Strangers was published, Bhanu Kapil has received dozens of letters and emails from readers who have taken the questions that foreground the book’s structure and answered them in their own way… Kelsey Street press invites you to send us your answers to the Vertical questions.”
Amber’s post sent me back to the book. I wanted to respond to the call but wasn’t sure how or when I’d have time. At the same time I was trying to figure out the structure for a workshop in the fall. In past workshops, I’d paired two texts and asked writers to respond in some way to the combined pressures of the combinations (i.e. Gaston Bachelard and Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Brenda Coultas and Mark Nowak, David Antin and Tracie Morris) and it struck me that it might be interesting to shift modes and answer the 12 questions from the Vertical Interrogation for Strangers in workshop. I was also thinking through some problems of earlier classes where I’d assigned more outside reading than people were willing to read for a workshop, which negatively impacted our conversations and limited the emergence of a field of concern or inquiry.
In constructing the class, I paired each question with a single reading. From the syllabus:
Our basic procedure will be to read and discuss, in conjunction with each question, a poem or other piece of writing that in some way addresses, upends, interrogates or comes alongside the question…
At the next class session, you will each bring in a poem that in some way answers, rejects, upends, interrogates or otherwise addresses the question, and/or the reading we’ve discussed, if the reading takes you in a useful direction.
The questions and paired readings are as follows:
Who are you and whom do you love?
No reading; for the first poem, please answer from whatever place your poetry is currently engaged.
What do you remember about the earth?
reading: Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache, Juliana Spahr
How will you begin?
reading: “VIA (48 Dante Variations)”, Dante & Caroline Bergvall
Describe a morning you woke without fear.
reading: “G-9”, Tim Dlugos
Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
reading: “The Cherry Pickers”, Yedda Morrison
Where did you come from / how did you arrive?
reading: selections from Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?
reading: poems from She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, M. Nourbese Philip
What is the shape of your body?
reading: poems from The Cow, Ariana Reines
How will you live now?
reading: “To be in a time of war”, Etel Adnan
What are the consequences of silence?
reading: “Lecture on Nothing”, John Cage
How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?
reading: “punk half panther”, Juan Felipe Herrera
And what would you say if you could?
No reading. The final project, a chapbook, will serve as your answer to the last question.
Writing now, I’m thinking about everything that shows up in the negative space of this syllabus, particularly how the inclusion of certain readings was thanks to various conversations: Dana Ward pointed me towards Tim Dlugos’ devastating long poem “G-9” in the online journal EOAGH, Tyrone Williams played some sound recordings of M. Nourbese Philip at a talk he gave last May in the bay area, and then the work of Ariana Reines was being feverishly discussed at various blogs when I was putting this syllabus together. I could go on.
What emerged over the fall semester were a number of things I hadn’t seen, particularly the way that many of these poems work with framing devices and upset various reader expectations, how many of these poems ask questions about language acquisition and use, all the complicated ways speech and writing intersect with history, economics, location, migration, war. Some of those concerns are embedded in the questions themselves (and certainly in Bhanu’s book, which we read and looked at about halfway through the semester), and I’m unclear now which preceded which. Something else that emerged over the semester was the way that several readings and questions could easily have been switched; some readings could have been paired with four or five of the questions. I’m curious about how another person would have constructed a syllabus from these questions.
I’m still thinking about and am not sure how successful this construction was. So many questions/readings made for a breakneck speed, leaving no time to turn in revisions on a regular basis. I’m also thinking about how difficult some of those questions are to answer, finally. In terms of community building, something about the difficulty of the questions seemed most operative—being together in the questions, the surprise of how one writer might find a way to reject the terms another writer in the class might build an entire project from.
–Stephanie Young, KSP guest blogger (Visit her at the Well Nourished Moon blog in our sidebar).
February 3, 2009
Yedda Morrison, Kim Rosenfield, and Kaia Sand at SPT this Friday
Friday, February 6, 2009 at 7:30 p.m.
Writer and visual artist Yedda Morrison was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Morrison’s books include; Girl Scout Nation (Displaced Editions, 2008), My Pocket Park (Dusie Press, 2007), and Crop (Kelsey Street Press, 2003). Morrison has exhibited her work in the US and Canada and is currently represented by Republic Gallery in Vancouver, BC (republicgallery.com). She lives in Montreal.
Kim Rosenfield is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of three books of genre/blurring language; Good Morning–Midnight– (Roof Books 2001), which won Small Press Traffic’s Book of the Year award in 2002, Tràma (Krupskaya 2004), and re: evolution (Les Figues Press 2008). She lives in NYC with her husband, poet Robert Fitterman and their daughter, Coco.
Kaia Sand is the author of the poetry collection interval (Edge Books 2004), selected as a Small Press Traffic Book of the Year, and co-author with Jules Boykoff of Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space. Dusie Press published her wee book, lotto, and Sand has participated in the dusie kollektiv for three years, making the chapbooks heart on a tripod and tiny arctic ice. Jim Dine created two artist book based on Sand’s poems, lotto and tiny arctic ice. Remember to Wave, multi-media investigations of political histories lodged in Pacific Northwest of the United States, is forthcoming with Tinfish Press. The NAFTA, a chapbook of collages, is forthcoming with Duration Press e-chap series. Sand co-edits the Tangent Press.