It might be that, for certain poets, the refusal to write about their lives comes not of their own will, as though they simply choose not to write about their lives; rather, they are unable to write about their lives because any use of straightforward language would destroy those impressions in them that there is no language for—the taboo, the strange, the antisocial, the anxieties and ordinary humiliations of daily life.
The defining characteristic of genius is then the possession of a secret that the poet has no ability to express, something not just shameful, but the acknowledgment of which would destabilize the poet’s reality, as though there are certain ideas that live in her that she wished she didn’t have.
But, at the same time, dealing with that insane idea causes all the foundations of her life to evaporate; all the floating blocks of the civilized city of her life, the streets of her relations with other people, start rising like balloons, like ascending nooses. The poet finds herself with herself like a child finding herself amongst many reflective, floating bubbles. Only when the bubbles of reality start to rise, only then can the poet begin to see herself face to face.
Because the language for those feelings does not exist yet, the poet must resort to paradox. In the poetry of Moon Bo Young (born 1992), as with Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Yi Sang, we can see the effect of inner feelings that have no solution, that cannot be resolved in real life, which must take on a second, beautiful life, as contradictions whose inner stability only a poem can maintain.
With Moon’s poetry, as though one were reading the poetry of a Soviet writer under oppression, the reader can only turn into a detective, searching for the diary, the life underneath the poems, the life that the poet refuses to acknowledge or tell us. This life comes across stronger, and more powerfully, because the detective reader is chased, at every moment, by an uncanny feeling, by hints, like when you are talking with somebody who has an internal obsession or is considering something crazy: the talk with this person goes on, but you speak only on the surface of the waters; you can detect at every moment some consideration that goes beyond the face that is present before you. Moon’s poetry is haunted by these unsaid things, by a remarkable force of sadness and anxiety.
A loneliness inhabits these poems. The ability to communicate, or be understood, seems to be something in which the poet has lost faith. Imaginary friends and voices talk to themselves in these poems, as though the poems were one long rumination, full of sudden shifts of tragedy, diaries that never detail her actual life, but which expose the silent, slow talking of those internal thoughts in a room where the clock has fallen off the wall but keeps on ticking.
For that reason, we can see why the social personality of the poet must be entirely different from the inner poet. A large expanse separates the poet you meet in person and the poet’s poetic voice. For poets in whom exists this hatred of the mirror, like Yi Sang, and Kafka, the parable, the paradox, is the language of this hideous expanse between themselves and society. It would be death for the poet to explain exactly what is hurting her. It would be the death of language. It would show, again, that language cannot communicate—language, the last thing she had faith in.
It would be like those times when you had in your head something awful and profound and obsessive, and tried to communicate it to a friend, to your only friend, who you thought could understand it; and so much was lost in translation that you decided to never communicate with anybody ever again—traumatized into untruths, silence, you expose to people only a false self that never says what you really think.
But, with the paradox, the poet can do something amazing and supernatural. The paradox is a lock that requires a special password. Only those readers who have gone through the same gates of hell know the password. Only those readers who have suffered the same iciness of silence will immediately pick up the hints. Other readers may enjoy the poems because they instinctively sense that something is not right, that something is being hinted at, something interesting is here in the jokiness; but Moon’s poetry, like Kafka’s parables, speaks to those moments that Kafka writes about in his diary: “Thursday. Spent all afternoon thinking about jumping out the window.”
Miyashita studies the attention disparity. Why do monkeys only pay sustained attention to other monkeys? Some people might be saddened by this fact. Why does the hanging person outside the window grin on a rainy day? How did he get to the 21st floor without a rope? Since the word neuron comes from rope, when you have a memory you want to forget, just tie it up.
(Moon Bo Young, “Brain and Me,” trans. Hedgie Choi)
Estrangement of feeling
Moon writes premise poems that allow her to feel her own feelings but not as her own. In her collection A Bookstore in the Pouring Sand (trans. Soje), poems begin with a premise, an assumption. In the world or poem that is about to begin in “Winterized Trees,” Moon announces, there is no “insulation.” Therefore, no one would ever ask to turn on the heat. Everyone, in this world without insulation, relies upon “winterized trees” to stay warm; that is, people must hug trees to stay alive.
The feeling that Moon wants to express is: “Trees are wonderful.”
The feeling she wants to express is actually the theme of a nature poet, but to express those feelings in the language of a traditional nature poet would actually kill the tree, since that conventional poetic usage deadens that language. Her sad, silly poems are oddly similar to Kafka’s short parables; the poet estranges herself slightly from the feeling of the poem in order to feel it more strongly. “Humans,” Moon writes, “hug trees on their way to work, on their way to see loved ones . . . on their way to a break up.” Even someone who would like to die must muster up the strength to die by hugging a tree, she writes. The tree leads even onto a path towards suicide.
Her poems proceed by a calm logical-illogical intensity. What could that possibly mean?
In “What it means to adjust,” Moon starts with the premise: “The average human takes 0.4 seconds to blink.”
Then the logical-illogicking starts. The person who does this logical-illogicking is “Olivia,” allowing Moon to maintain a comedic distance from the thinking. Whenever someone blinks, Olivia thinks, they die for 0.4 seconds and come back to life. “Or transform into someone else. In which case,” Olivia concludes, “humans would transform 15,000 times a day. This is probably why I can’t ever get used to myself” (emphasis mine).
The logical-illogicking leads to an existential feeling that is grounded, as if proved, by the illogical premises. The mathematical steps allow the diary’s feeling to take place unexpectedly. Simultaneously, the previous steps logically demand the conclusion. Soje’s wonderful translation maps this pressure perfectly: the logical-illogicking proceeds towards a statement that is the core of the poem, a statement of emotionally-charged absurdity. “This is probably why I can’t ever get used to myself.”
The feeling is one of intense self-unease, perhaps even hatred, the existential hatred of the mirror, which seems to be something unique and powerful in Moon Bo Young, Yi Sang, and Kafka. It could be called Poetry that hates the mirror. Yi Sang writes:
When I look at my face in the mirror
I’m not here—there is only I
who fled inside the mirror.
You cannot escape from the fact of being yourself. Just so, you can never get used to yourself. The feeling that Moon invokes is that intensity of poetry with hatred of the mirror. However, Moon never lets herself get drunk with sentimentality, with melodrama. Her self-unease must be meticulous and logical. This kind of self-examination and self-unease succeeds because displaying the logic of that self-unease works by negating the abyss, by making the feeling come across as comedy.
Because of this, Moon’s poems come across not as dead inside, but as silly-sad. Comedy infects them. A most marvelous silliness . . . This silliness is not a posture, but a state of existence. This silliness is the essence of these poems. A diary poet from the 1960s often expresses her pain in language of violence or bathos. Think of the incredible Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus.” But, for Moon, I would argue, something distinctively twenty-first-century about these poems lies in the refusal to express one’s pain except through childish silliness.
Silliness is the refuge of someone who feels a suffering so overwhelming that they have built up internal walls to hold the waters of that suffering, walls that are overwhelming and strong, walls which the poets themselves cannot breach; the only way to let them out is, as it were, with a slight jokiness. Moon may be writing suicide poems, but the suicide comes across semi-sarcastically. A poet writing thus can avoid being sent to the mental ward by the meager defense that they are making art.
And there is the vulnerability and innocence of a child . . . Think of how children express their pain. “I’m sad.” “Mom keeps yelling at me.” “The moon is so bright today.” From a stylistic perspective, if one is writing poems of incredible suffering, the presence of a child’s voice brings into contrast the moons, the dark landscape, the silvers and whites of the glancing otherworld. Children often express their pain through behaving silly, through twisting and turning, throwing a tantrum.
That way of expressing pain is Moon’s poetic-emotional style, and common to poets like Sono Kim as well. It is as though she were a baby, kept within pajamas that sealed her fingers and toes. But the baby’s grown slightly larger, her fingers and toes extend painfully against the sealed-in pajamas. Without language to express herself, the baby can only squirm, turn this way and that, throw up her food, rage and cry, infuriating her parents, receiving more punishment, banished to darkness. And why? The skin in which she exists is too tight. Everything bothers her.
Silly-sad Moon Bo Young! There is a mysterious, profound, childishness to her tone. Her poems that speculate use the illogical guessing of a toddler. Innocent and clear, the tone has no pretense, no pretentiousness. Big multisyllabic words, favored by so many American philosophical poets, vanish. One does not write something like (my parody):
Neuron, oceanic ropes, arising
The birds fleeing through me;
And suddenly the heterodox
Of feeling, the doxing
Of horizontalized supersentiment.
No! Because she has already ordered the thoughts in her brain, the poet is very sure of what she has to say. Simplicity is the sign of her talent. A simplicity of clean language descends into infinite depths of paradox. She is very sure of her voice, like a child. This surety is the telltale sign of a personality magically transformed into poetry. Once such a personality transforms into poetry, it can never die.
This fever of illogical-logicking is exactly what we find in any line of Kafka. Kafka’s aesthetic logical-illogicking is inspired by the rabbinical tradition, in which scholars would debate over lines of the Talmud until they finally encountered spiritual intensity. The purpose of that debate was to produce a spiritual fruit, a logical fervor, a new reading that solved the feeling of the times. Kafka’s “logic” is never correct. That is, its conclusions are never correct, or at the very least, the conclusion is almost always suicide or death. But these conclusions are arrived at inexorably, enchained by logical command. Likewise, Moon’s feelings are arrived at in this strange, estranged way by “premise poem,” by mathematical suggestion: Imagine a world that is missing x or y.
With Korean poet Yi Sang (1910-1937), feverish paradox also brings about an expansion of the mind. His mental breakdowns break the borders of the mind. Where Moon Bo Young’s poems are silly-sad, Yi Sang’s poems are humorous but dead inside. These poems are startling and, to the untrained person, initially challenging precisely because the thing that has written them is properly called madness; what the poems give to the reader is precisely that steel, still-active taste of madness—after the madness has killed the poet.
Madness is boring, a long illness, dreary, and very logical. Consider “Poem no. 15” and “Poem no. 13” by Yi Sang, wonderfully brought into the English language by Jack Jung.
1
I am in a room with no mirror. Of course, the me-inside-the-mirror has gone out right now. I shudder in fear of him. Where did he go? What is he plotting to do with me?
Poem no. 13
My arm is cut off while holding a razor. When I examine it, it is pale blue, terrified of something. I lose my remaining arm the same way, .like candelabras to decorate my room. My arms, even though they are dead, seem terrified of me. I love such flimsy manners more than any flowerpot.
“I lose my remaining arm the same way,” the matter-of-fact manner is of madness. Well, not madness. The world is simply exactly what it resembles: the metaphor that I imagine is literalized, made real. Thus, images of extreme violence are not treated with any ado. They are simply what happens. The schizophrenic has a detached view of reality.
And yet, unlike a schizophrenic’s truly detached view of the world, Yi Sang, like Moon, has an extremely emotional expression in the poem. Like steel, however, that extreme emotion is conveyed by a twisted detachment. At the end of “Poem no. 13,” Yi Sang says that his arms, though cut off and dead, seem terrified of him. (This is the jokiness, the comedy of such detached and violent absurdism). But he reveals his secret in the final line: “I love such flimsy manners more than any flowerpot.” A flowerpot is the ars poetica. His poems are as shit as his arms that he has cut off. They are “flimsy manners,” of awkward style. And yet he loves them more than any flowers.
Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” is also a “poem” with mirror hatred. Exactly like Yi Sang’s “Poem no. 13,” it is an artist’s self-hating poem. The artist is hating upon his very art while creating the art: the artist hates himself so deeply that he reaches into the core of his being and hates himself there.
A hunger artist is an artist whose whole career consists in starving himself; at first successful, he eventually suffers from the indifference of the public. Even then, however, he—like Kafka, an unread writer—continues to pursue his art, arriving at even more intense purities.
Kafka’s emotional-illogicking is the same as what we find in Yi Sang and Moon. This is not the tracing of a genealogy: Yi Sang came earlier than Kafka, and all living spirits are contemporaneous. Here’s Kafka:
“We do admire it,” said the overseer, affably. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then we don’t admire it,” said the overseer, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I have to fast, I can’t help it,” said the hunger artist.The source of this illogical-logicking is the presence of self-annihilation. This self-annihilation is both philosophical (nothingness) as it is physical (suicide). Death points at the illogical. For those for whom the yearning for suicide is an assumption, the boundary of death has ceased to exist. The scary boundary ceases to have its common significance: once fear of death has passed into desire, just once, the human being who has desired suicide is not the same. From the point-of-view of someone who has never had that experience, this is an “absurd” or “illogical” standpoint. But the poet who knows knows: you can say very funny things after you have wanted to kill yourself.
“What a fellow you are,” said the overseer, “and why can’t you help it?”
“Because . . . I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.” These were his last words . . .
If, for the poet, the boundary of death has ceased to exist, their language becomes more interesting. Common logic has ceased to hold. And with that comes comedy.
Actually, this is why these writers also love animals.
Only a certain type of person needs to be hugged by trees. Moon writes, “Humans hug trees on their way to work, on their way to see loved ones, on their way to the airport . . .” Only a certain type of person will write (Moon), “Holding him will help.” This self-annihilating outlook, in which human beings gaze back at you like a mirror, finds restfulness in looking at things that can’t gaze back—pets, trees, cats, dogs. What I love most about this writing is its pantheism.
Investigations of a dog, thinking trees . . .
The difference between Proust and Kafka is this: one of them has thoughts about the tree, the other has a tree that thinks.
Whoever has lost the boundary of death has also lost the boundary between persons and things.
Hysterical Pain
A wonderful new wave of young Korean poets is making its arrival into the United States. With the help of tireless translators like Eunice Lee, Jack Jung, Soje, Hedgie Choi, and Jenny Jisun Kim, poets as diverse as Kim Liyoun, Sono Kim, Lee Hyemi, and Moon Bo Young—the list goes on—have made their arrival on the shores of the United States. It’s no surprise that many of these translators are also extremely talented poets who belong to the same wave.
One of the joys of reading these poets is that their own culture is centered in such a way that they do not bother to talk about other cultures.
So often, Asian-American writing is forced to bog itself down in traumas, to sell work to a mainstream white audience.
It’s like when you walk into a noodle shop, much publicized, highly praised on Instagram, and find only white people eating there; the restaurant is more successful than a mom-and-pop noodle shop because the shop has put on white-people-facing makeup. It works and the book clubs eat there.
At times, in some writers, it feels as though the work was made for white eyes: resentment at white people makes the work, paradoxically, about white people.
The work is not self-existent; it exists in opposition to another people. The book, from the Asian-American experience, succeeds because white people these days want to read about how white people are bad. But that says nothing about whether or not the work truly possesses genius. Only that it speaks to the discourse. And what other way is there for an Asian-American writer to get famous, if not by writing for the buzz, for the discourse?
It’s wise for an Asian-American writer to fetishize their own culture, in part because Americans are unfamiliar with those parts of their culture and thus, the poetic language seems, at surface level, to be original and new.
Hence the poems that go like this (my parody):
Mother, where are you?
And when you slandered your teacher
In that movement misnamed Cultural Revolution,
Did you ever conceive
That you’d have a son
Who a white boy would hit
Skin soft as silk,
And he’d like it.
One major cultural difference, I think, must be the difference between (East) Asian ways of expressing pain and American ways. I think most Asian people are taught to diminish their pain, to never speak it aloud, to be ashamed of their own weakness. You hide the thing because if you showed it to someone, you might have to kill that person, because now someone else knows that you are weak.
In other words, the repression of the pain, as one sees in Kazuo Ishiguro, creates a stronger art, requiring double-readings and detective work on the part of the reader. Americans like Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Ben Lerner, so verbal—the children of intellectuals and therapists—write in such a way that one feels constantly the noise of America, and so seldom does one feel the pure silence of contemplation and rumination. American noise is hysterical, omnipresent; perhaps that is why we have been weakened and debilitated. When Americans and Asian-Americans write about their pain, it is often hysterical pain.
Mother, mother
You beat me—on a sunday.
And when the white boy beat me
You were not dead
For a sunday.
What’s more, there is a distinctive American inability to think outside of American-ness. One can see that in the urge for these writers to write about how we Americans (New Yorkers) live now.
With certain Asian-American writers, exactly like their white-American counterparts, there is an urge to describe what the Asian-American experience is like. In my opinion, this is all part of the American discourse, even if it attempts to negate the dominant American discourse. To want more representation of Asian-American faces in American literature is to dream of your own cage. Your American-ness is even more obvious. American-ness is this: an accomplishment culture, the idea that doing something for society matters, that by rising to the top of the social hierarchy, you have done something.
No! More silence, less noise!
Artists, hoping to excite sentimentality, hoping to trigger people and make them cry, flower in their traumas, pretend their whole body is one open wound; they write constantly about the deaths they have experienced, the things that have made them a victim. They dig up, remorselessly, the corpses of their mothers, ploys for sympathy. There is no thing or theme in them which they would not dare use up for the sake of writing, for clout, for art. But bury the thing deeper! Bury the corpse without sacrificial clothes, so that it slowly rots, so deep inside the heart-soil, that someone walking near the grave can smell it emanating from the earth.
