BY APRIL DE NONNO
Against that sameness Myung Mi Kim has placed the quiet reply of her poems, whose words reverberate as signposts of a language meant to recreate the uncontainable. In “Penury” (2009), she returns again to the wasteland of the past (Korea, mostly) and ripples through its shards of glass and scattered petals. Her poetry is like something exposed too long to the elements: cracked, blasted, worn away by neglect, cruelty, and indifference. Or unleashed — from the restraints of syntax, from speech sounds chained together. On the page letters eddy away from words and spiral into combinations that elude recognition. White space swallows typography or blankets the lines in silence:
[lookout post]
Are these your names
From we are from where are you from
Say this may speaking
To burn or expose to the threat of the sun a person
with a pigeon chest and protruding stomach
At times a grotesque beauty coincides with the wreckage. Penury’s broken sequences yield moments of lyricism as rhythm, sound, and imagery give way to song: “Could the rock be that yellow, canary yellow // Corresponding // Pelvis Bowl // Bunker buster bomb.” Imagistic and elusive, silent and expressive, passages like this one show the way Myung Mi Kim’s words tend toward the sonic qualities of music even at their most a-logical or unfamiliar.
Many readers will glance at a page of Myung Mi Kim’s poetry and find it terminally off-putting. Others will be thrilled for the same reasons exactly. Yet I wish the off-put readers would simply keep going. There is no secret meaning to decode in this poetry. Penury (or “Dura” or any of her other books) offers a great gift in its seemingly alien communications. Who hasn’t experienced some version of pain or terror or sadness or hope, the kind that leaves us speechless, beyond words? If, in such a moment, we did find the words to say what we felt, those words might well resemble one of Myung Mi Kim’s desolate assemblages. Still, there would be no sameness there, just a disorderly kinship.