Some poems are so ambitious that they are in a class of their own. They are so boundary-crossing and complex that they require a level of code-breaking to read.
Those are predominant ideas in reading Monica Youn’s collection of poetry titled From From, which point to the power of socially constructed identity and origins to the point that others’ misinformed senses of the self (and one’s peoples, and one’s histories) may distort and stereotype and re-define, make an individual the perpetual outsider, the foreigner, the threat, and so justify any sort of punishment or violence.
The “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë / Sado)” reads like a riddle. Pasiphaë was the queen of Crete and the wife of King Minos. She engaged in a forbidden love with a white bull, which led to the birth of the minotaur, with the head of a bull and a body of a man. Sado, the second name in the parenthetical reference, was the crown prince of Joseon Dynasty in Korea. He engaged in conflicts with his father and stepmother and was eventually starved to death while imprisoned in a wooden chest. The story of the myth based in Colchis, and the historical prince from Korea, are analyzed in terms of how humanity has tried to contain people from dangerous and threatening thinking and behaviors. While the first dealt with fictionalized sexual impulses, the latter dealt with political ones, and the poet asserts that the two are the same thing. Particular combinations of people’s impetuses, “horror and glee” and “lust and revenge,” are of particular concern. Essentially, the world creates boxes to hold and punish those who would break taboos because the world is constructed to enable the “frictionless transfer of power.”
Youn observes that containers are to neutralize what lies within, whether it is national identity, Asianness, race, or something else seen as threatening. Nothing less than their destruction is warranted based on fear. She writes:
Each of these containers contains desire and its satisfaction.
“Each of these containers contains discomfort and deterrence.
“Each of these containers contains a hot button, a taboo.
Containers enable “the slaking of desire from the punishment of desire.”
In “Marsyas, After,” the poem uses as a beginning the story of a satyr (half-man, half-goat in Greek mythology). Marsyas, as a powerful flute-player, challenged Apollo, the god of music. As the loser of that competition, he was flayed alive, and his skin was turned into a bagpipe. The back story is not directly in the poem. Rather, the poem captures Marsyas in frozen skinless agony, who if given the chance to be reskinned, would not.
…What used
to distinguish me is already
defeated, limp trophy
flag of conquest; now I could be
like them if I chose.
But the acidulated
rain imposes a least
common denominator
democracy, it scours away
the pigments they used
to humanize their marmoreal self-
regard, their eyes gone dull
as the calluses I would suffer
forever rather than become.
His stance comes from a place of victimhood but also triumph. He would keep sensitivity instead of being calloused:
…I stain everything
I touch, it all stains me…
In competitions with gods, perhaps, there are no half-measures.
Youn continues with the comparatives between characters in “Study of Two Figures (Orpheus / Eurydice).” In this myth, Orpheus goes to the underworld to try to win back his young late wife. The poem is written in a grid-like structure, which enables reading multi-directionally. Indeed, the nature of this relationship may be read both hopefully and cynically.
In “Study of Two Figures (Echo / Narcissus),” the poem plays with Narcissus’ egoistic self-love which does not leave room for any other.
…’I want / want I’ —the mirror
that makes two
This poem and others are works of artistic empathy and projective imagination.
“Study of Two Figures (Midas / Marigold)” plays on myth as a bridge to the contemporaneous present. To put something living in fixed form is a kind of death because the target has stopped growing and changes. So, too, does King Midas’ effect on his daughter Marigold who is accidentally frozen. The closing line of this poem seems to refer to the U.S.: “Even the rivers in this country pave their streets with gold.” This may be part of a critique of the economic system perhaps, the brutalities of capitalism, and the often single-minded pursuit of lucre and shiny things.
“Study of Two Figures (Agave / Pentheus)” revisits the mother-son pair. Agave was queen of Thebes and the mother of Pentheus. She was a devotee of Dionysus. Penthesus, though, banned the worship of Dionysus. In a “divine frenzy,” Agave and her followers (known as the Bacchae) attacked Pentheus in their collective delusion that he was a wild animal. This work suggests that fanatical commitments may be held more sacred than blood and result in destructive (dis)loyalties.
Several works deal direct with modern senses of race. “Deracinations: Eight Sonigrams” contains memories of growing up Korean-American in the U.S. and different ways that identity was denied, shaped, discarded, and wrangled.
“Installation” is a poem written after Asad Raza’s Root Sequence, Mother Tongue (2017). Here, the poet observes the interactions between the living and the dead in a biological system, in the cycle of life. Youn writes:
In the forest a seedling cries for its rot-mother
A berry serenades a sparrow, a carcass sighs to its spores
Slow tremolo of fungi, the needle-whine of flies
The living stitched to the living stitched to the dead
Then the poem shifts to a museum, and the installation…which results in a powerful insight of how to be in the world as a biological being:
Each of us owns our own beam of magenta light
Each of us subsists on a cubic yard of Miracle-Gro
Nothing needs to die in order for us to eat
In “Study of Two Figures (Ignatz / Krazy),” the poem is ostensibly about a drawing practice, using abstract shapes to evoke the bodies of drawn characters. The work address the more subtle rules of engagement in the drawing space, in motion design, but then, the work transitions to the spillover of rules into human life, that suggest generics with “blanks” and the inherent other of non-blanks. Suddenly, the rules of social organizing emerges, with a dominant set and non-dominant ones.
“Study of Two Figures (Dr. Seuss / Chrysanthemum-Pearl)” has at its heart the strange dynamics of the Geisel family in their creating an imaginary child to stand in for their inability to have one of their own. The imaginary child is to be the subject of dinner conversations if that topic came up socially. She would be an other-race child, Chrysanthemum-Pearl. At the same time as this imaginary “adoption,” Ted Geisel or Dr. Seuss depicted the Japanese as an enemy race in another work. This work is based on a passage from Brian Jay Jones’ Becoming Dr. Seuss, a biography. This play of imagination shows how contradictorily the human imagination can work.
One of the most wrenching poems of the collection is “Parable of the Magpie in the Trap.” A magpie is caught in a wire-mesh trap without food and without water…when a hunter approaches. The magpie begs for its freedom with a series of arguments. The hunter does not answer. He does return later with a perch and then a roof overhead. The dynamic continues with the magpie arguing for its freedom, the fact that it does not contravene any of the core interests of the hunter. Ultimately, the intelligent and reasoning magpie learns the reason for the trap and the hunter’s incentives. This interchange reveals a core and potent reality of a common human emotion: hate. This theme re-emerges in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Magpie,” which ends with the line: “As if the cure for hatred could ever be knowledge, eyes lidlocked open, well-irrigated, forced to see.”
“Parable of the Magpie and the Mirror” has a scientist who runs experiments on a magpie whom he suspects of having potentially equal intelligence to him. He runs a series of “tests” and then has a conversation with the magpie. The human scientist insists on handling his discovery a peculiar way. “Parable of the Magpies in the West” has magpies flying innocently west to be of service, given the West’s diseased state, only to be blamed and hated and hunted.
Race relations figure prominently in the multi-part prose poem titled “In the Passive Voice.” The poem suggests that some truths are so controversial that they can only be come at in the passive voice, indirectly; otherwise, they may be too provocative. One stanza explores why people seem to have to extract a price for any expression of care for others. Humans go to advantage-taking of others in a heartbeat, as in the racial ancestors brought stateside to work sugar cane fields. In another snapshot, newer generations of Koreans who emigrated to the U.S. were educated and never had any association with hard labor. They were privileged and in some denial of connections to prior Asian arrivals. There is the idea that the Asian American population was used as a buffer between the whites and the blacks in the U.S. (and perhaps benefitted from being the third that benefits, tertius gaudens). Youns takes on the tense race relations between Koreans and African Americans in L.A. and the situated racial injustice in the fatal attack on Latasha Harlins by a Korean store owner. The stanzas update to the present, when the poet has to arm herself with encouragement and mace in the pandemic era racial strife against Asians, among others.
“Detail of the Rice Chest” engages language and the themes of the collection to explore the complex nuances of racial identity. It shows the difficulties in navigating an intimate interracial relationship in microcosm as an aspect of the greater societal racial dynamics at the macro levels.
From From by Monica Youn captures race relations in the present moment as a continuance of a torturous and violent history of humanity struggling with what is threatening and seen as destabilizing. There are some small acts of resistance possible, but general trajectories are larger than individual persons. This poet is the creator of three prior poetry collections: Barter (2003), Ignatz (2010), and Blackacre (2016).
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
