Suji Kwock Kim's Notes from the Divided Country

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

We discussed Suji Kwock Kim's Notes from the Divided Country in class yesterday evening.



This collection of poems is well worth reading. I would characterize Kim as a poet interested in playing with the multiple meanings of words and with some traditional poetic situations and forms (such as dramatic monologue, nocturne, etc.). Her poems are clever, and they make the reader feel clever for getting the cheeky play with words or the layered meanings of metaphorical language.

There are four sections of poetry in the volume. I found the poems in the first two to be the most interesting. The first section's poems seem to worry over the issue of generations, pregnancy, offspring, motherhood, and cultural transmission. The human body, especially parts like the womb, come front and center in a series of descriptions in "Generation":

now neurons sizzling, dendrites buzzing,
now arteries tunneling tissue like tubes hoooked to an IV;
now organs pumping, hammers of hunger and thirst pounding,
now sinews cleaving, tendons lashing meat to bone:
meanwhile my skeleton welding, scalp cementing like mortar,
meanwhile my face soldered on, hardening like a mask of molten steel,
meanwhile my blood churning like a furnace of wanting,
meanwhile my heart ticking like a bomb--is-was, is-was:

As these lines suggest, much of the power of her poetry lies in describing mundane or clinical things in provocative ways, grasping at metaphors or analogies, linking parts of the bodies to buildings and other structures.

The second section's poems generally concern war and violence. These are the most powerful poems for me. Though Kim herself did not live through the Japanese occupation of Korea or the Korean civil war, she takes on the speaking persona of family members and others who did survive through horrific events. Robert Pinsky's comments on her poem "Occupation" in the Washington Post, pointing out how the strength of this kind of poetry is in its ability to mobilize the multiple meanings of words rather than paring down to a single, clear definition. The poem also draws in larger historical and political forces to bear on individual or private bodies -- the "you" addressed by the speaker of the poem. Some of the descriptions are incredibly disturbing such as the closing lines of "Fragments of the Forgotten War":

I think of the loneliness of the dying,
                            the bodies I saw along the way, rotting separately:
 
i think of that boy biting his arm
                                 who didn't live through the night,
wild dogs gnawing at his skull in the morning, his whole face an "exit wound":
 
I think of a carcass foaming with maggots, the bone black with hatching flies.

(During the semester, I've assigned to individual students one book that she reads and then reports on to the class. For this class session, the novels all dealt either with Korean comfort women in the Japanese imperial army during WWII or with the Korean War. The three novels were Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, and Susan Choi's The Foreign Student. The students all noted how intensely graphic the scenes of violence and torture were in those novels as well.)

The third section's poems seemed to be variations on love poems or poems about relationships between the speaker and addressee. The funniest one of the bunch is "Monologue for an Onion" in which Kim takes on the persona of an onion being chopped by a person, leveling a series of criticisms against the human chopper for pursuing knowledge blindly and causing death and destruction in almost every endeavor.

The fourth section's poems seem a bit more diffuse, organized around various observations and contemploations of mundane objects and experiences.

I don't think Suji Kim's poetry is as interesting to read multiple times as the more opaque poetry of writers like Myung Mi Kim or Catalina Cariaga. This is not to say that her poetry is not as good as a result, but it definitely is poetry that you "get" reading it once. There isn't as much work involved in puzzling through the lines and words.

Comments

[sa-am.livejournal.com]

hey pylduck

thanks for the review; i've actually heard some harsh criticism on this work, strangely enough, some by other poets =)

i read it and enjoyed it and can empathize with her work as my own parents were "war refugees" during the "forgotten war"

i may teach it in the future!

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

What kind of harsh criticism? I might expect some people to say it's too facile, too much about the immediate play with words rather than about a substantive querying of words, sounds, and meaning. Formally, the poems also seem less... rigorous... than they could be. I haven't sat down to scan the lines, though, to see if it's an issue of stress-unstress rhythms. But then again, poetry tends to elude me. And I'm often not sure why certain writing is poetry while other is not.

My favorite part of her poems is how in her war poems she takes on the speaking persona of people who have experienced war and occupation. As a collection, that section of poems offers a nice range of perspectives.

Maybe other poets are also jealous that she's smokin' hot. ;)