Myung Mi Kim is a poet who is most often referred to a Postmodern. As we look at a description of Postmodernism, we see how it fits into Kim’s reliance on the reader and how it lends to some of the ideas she explore throughout Commons:
Postmodernism is largely a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be fallible and relative, rather than certain and universal. (Pbs.org)
Although Kim relies heavily on the reader she gives hints to herself – and her life – throughout Commons.
Another way to describe Myung Mi Kim and her work is as a “hybrid” poet. In an anthology she edited, Cole Swensen gives a brief definition on what a hybrid poet and poem is:
Today’s hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first person; yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. (Swensen )
Myung Mi Kim is a Korean immigrant whose family fled Korea following the Korean, when Kim was nine years old. Kim uses this idea as one of the threads that holds her work – specifically Commons in this case – together. What this biographical thread does – if the reader knows a bit of Kim’s background – is allow the reader to read through a certain lens, the lens of biographical criticism. Reading Commons through this lens gives the reader a “fixed point” in which ideas throughout Commons are relative. This idea of a “fixed point” comes from the poet Cole Swensen, which in an interview with The Continental Review she explains as:
…I’m trying to give the reader one firm place because the rest is going to be moving. If all the terms are moving, there is no point of relativity, there is no way to actually make these moving objects relate to each other if there is not one fixed point. There is something about the way the work of the world is a matter of always finding a fixed point against which other things are relative (Swensen )
In Commons, a “fixed point” can be immigration/assimilation. When read through the lens of Biographical criticism immigration/assimilation becomes the “fixed point” because that experience is that of Kim herself, and she nudges the reader in this direction throughout Commons, if the reader considers Kim’s personal experience alongside a general post-war experience.
From the onset of Commons, Kim gives the reader something to grasp when reading through a biographical lens, “In what way names were applied to things. Filtration. Not every word that has been / applied, still exists. Through proliferation and differentiation. Airborn. Here, this speck and this speck you missed” (1-3). This opening stanza of Commons speaks to displacement, through the eyes of the displaced. This stanza can be interpreted in a few ways I’m sure, but when read with the given “fixed point,” displacement emerges. This first stanza of Commons sets the table for the rest of the work where Kim uses the text to subtly – with exception of a few parts, which aren’t so subtle – portray her own story. Although she portrays her own story, Kim relies on the reader to “to understand [his or her] own particular and personal reality.”
The “Siege Document” section of the piece “Works” is the most concrete portrayal of Myung Mi Kim’s experience with immigration/assimilation. The section starts with the text being written in Korean, which not only speaks to displacement and the immigration as a whole but also on language itself – to be elaborated upon further later. What the Korean text does – besides alienate the reader – is it gives a glimpse as to what was present. The entire page of text is in Korean, with the exception of the last line of the page. The last line of the page is in English and is a question. This speaks to the questioning of the this different – to Kim, new – language. The first thing one does when encountering a new language – or culture, or life – is question. The questioning can be in the form of questioning its place, necessity, or authority. The following page of the “Siege Document” gives the reader further insight into Kim’s experience:
After a long last
I learn my story
My mother had a restaurant
She made noodle soup
It was famous noodle soup
She suffer so much
For so much of her life (29-35)
Again, Kim speaks to what was present, which is the quintessence of displacement. When one speaks of immigration or assimilation or displacement, one of the tenets of such an experience is language. Whether it is loss of language, gain of language, or resistance to language, language plays a major role in Kim’s experience. “Siege Document” is a prime example of Kim’s concerns with language and how they relate to her experience.
In an interview with James Kyung-Jin Lee, Myung Mi Kim speaks to her concerns with language in direct relation to her immigration experience:
But it Strikes me that there’s something about being nine or so, where you have enough access to the language that you feel a connection to the culture it’s located in, but you have yet to live out the complexities of participating in that culture fully. And, yet again, that culture is embedded in you somehow. In this strange region of knowing and not knowing, I have access to Korea as language and culture, but this access is shaped by rupture (leaving the country, the language). When I engage “Korea” –what resemblance does this have to any “real” place, culture, or language spoken there? (Kim )
What Kim speaks of here is the first page of “Siege Document” and the Korean text she employs. Is the Korean text she employs her access to the language at nine? Is that her participating in the Korean culture? Commons gives the reader a slight connection to Korea and the Korean War through Kim’s poetry. This idea assumes the reader to employ their own experiences to the text in relation to Kim’s experiences. The way Kim employs language throughout Commons is part of her overall poetics and she thinks of and uses language – and lack of language in intriguing ways.
In her poetics statement – which reads much like a poem itself – Myung Mi Kim explains her use of language and how, for her, language works. I emphasize the, “for her” in that previous statement because the way language works is unique to the individual – the rule of defaults. The word “car” will induce varying images in various readers. While each reader may have a vision of a car, they will be different cars. Kim relies on this idea of defaults not only in Commons, but also in her poetry across the board:
The Problem of [the presupposition of] [there already exists] a language for
Regularized language and knowledge. Standing for perceiving and thinking. Serving as arbiter of recognizability, and thus of affiliation. What is occluded in the sociohistorical index.
Fierce unsystematic recombinatory potential of language… Tests of mutually inflected deformations devolutions emendations of nations, languages – of being in time and history.
The practice of the poem is the practice of radical materiality
Poised at the Question of the question is the proximal (Kim )
A lot of what Kim explains here is the idea of the default. The idea of the default is coupled with the “fixed point.” Not all readers will have a default immigration experience, so Kim allows for the use of hers as both default and “fixed point.” If we look at a stanza from “Lamenta,” “When the wheel (A) was turned, the gate (B) was raised, thus allowing / water to flow from (C) to (D), giving clearance for the ship to pass beneath” (15-16). Here, if one employs both Kim’s given default and “fixed point” of immigration, this image becomes an image of her family fleeing Korea by way of the Pacific. The imagery of the wheel turning, coupled with the enclosed capital letters, induces a poster of the water cycle. This makes the stanza read as if they are being allowed to pass along the Pacific because of weather conditions conducive to traveling by sea, “ship to pass.” This is not the only read of this stanza and Kim allows for interpretation with her use of the white space on the page. The white space on the page allows time for digestion – so to speak – of the stanzas preceding the white space, similar to a “fill-in the blanks” idea or a “read between the lines” idea. When Kim mentions, “Fierce unsystematic recombinatory potential of language…” she is speaking to her use of the white space and its allowance for the reader to play with the different, potential combinations of the language presented and what those varying combinations might mean. The white space Kim enlists is also commentary on the gaps in thought and perception, which is an embodiment of the default idea. Kim also explores her own experiences with language and articulates these experiences throughout Commons.
The idea of the loss of language is explored in Commons in a couple of different ways. If we look back at the section “Siege Document,” and both sections mentioned above explore the loss of language. One, in what it induces in the reader and the other, by drawing from a generic position of displacement. The Korean text at the start of “Siege Document” alienates a reader who has no knowledge of the Korean language. What that Alienation does to this reader is it induces the uneasiness of encountering the unfamiliar. Because the unfamiliar, in this case, is language the reader can’t help to question in his or her own familiar language, which is what Kim does with the final line of that first page. Kim attempts here to bring the reader into an experience similar to her own by attempting to induce these feelings with the loss of language.
Kim also explores the loss of language further with lines 29-35, also from “Siege Document.” Here Myung Mi Kim explores the loss of language through a broken gained language. This is speaks to the default immigrant experience mentioned above that Kim employs to gain access to her work. Kim uses this broken language because broken language is often the easiest identifier of an immigrant. When a new language is first being gained it reveals itself broken and Kim applies that idea to her work to magnify a “fixed point.”
When reading poetry – or anything else for that matter – access is often the ultimate goal. Reading Myung Mi Kim’s work is no different, but gaining access to Kim’s work may be different than that of reading a Zadie Smith novel, or a Billy Collins poem. Kim relies heavily on the reader because she has a unique main objective in her work. Kim’s main objective is to attempt to create subjective experiences in her readers. This is why Kim relies on Reader-response, Biographical criticism and the establishment of a “fixed point” by readers. The white spaces or “loaded silences” are enlisted for the reader to gain access, to use to bridge the gap, not only between thought and perception, but also between Kim’s experience and his or her own.
The experience that Kim hopes to invoke is subjective. The access a given reader might gain to Kim’s work is subjective. Two readers reading the same text by Kim may have different reads, although both have gained access, it is their own access, which is exactly how Myung Mi Kim want her works to be accessed.
Works Cited
Cheung, King-Kok. Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Honolulu: University of Hawaii in Association with UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Los Angeles, 2000. Print.
"Cole Swensen Interview." The Continental Review. Web. 17 Dec. 2010.
"Glossary Definition: Postmodernism." PBS: Public Broadcasting Service. Web. 17 Dec. 2010.
Kim, Myung Mi. Commons. Berkeley: University of California, 2002. Print.
Rankine, Claudia, and Lisa Sewell. American Poets in the 21st Century: the New Poetics. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2007. Print.
Swensen, Cole, and John David St. American Hybrid: a Norton Anthology of New Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009. Print.
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