Koon Woon's The Truth in Rented Rooms

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

Koon Woon's poetry book The Truth in Rented Rooms (Kaya Press, 1998) turns on the idea of rooms--inhabiting them, defining them, being defined by them, and so on.



The poems are divided up into a few sections, which seem to correspond to chronological chunks of time and locations: 7th Avenue South (1985-1992), The Morrison (1993-1996), and International Terrace (1996-1998). The poems also seem to straddle reminiscences of a childhood in China with later experiences in the United States. Woon is also fascinated with philosophy, and some of the poems explicitly name figures like Socrates, Meng-Tse, and Heraclitus.

Some of the poems take on a kind of surreal quality. "Goldfish" begins, for example, with the stanza:

The goldfish in my bowl
turns into a carp each night.
Swimming in circles in the day,
regal, admired by emperors,
but each night, while I sleep,
it turns into silver, a dagger
cold and sharp, couched at one spot,
enough to frighten cats.

I love the subtle way that a hint of danger sneaks into the description of the goldfish-turned-carp. The contrast between regal gold and sharp silver is interestingly framed by the reaction of the cats.

As in the above example, many of the poems take as reference the mundane objects of one's room to reflect on more weighty historical and philosophical matters. "In my room..." begins:

In my room the world is true
Simply because I say it is true,
And truth is "spread out, like a patient,
Etherized upon a table..." in many rooms,
Rooms like mine...
And if you come to my room, one of the many
Parallel rooms that connect like the sections
Of a dragon, one black and one golden,
Interwoven and locked in mortal combat...

The reference to Eliot in these lines also demonstrates Woon's expansive reading and his incorporation of other writers' ideas into his work.

My favorite lines from the poem have to be these, which I borrowed for my Facebook status last week:

Would I cease to exist if I didn't think of my dog
Who thinks of me?

These lines humorously and thoughtfully plan on the classic questions of Cartesian philosophy about thought and existence....