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.