My piece in On the Seawall about Kim Hyesoon’s National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi, begins as follows:
“Picture a bird in your mind,” Kim Hyesoon writes. “What kind of bird is it?” One American poet might imagine a blackbird (“A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one”), while another might observe a sandpiper (“His beak is focussed; he is preoccupied”). Here is a section of Kim’s poem called “Owl”:
A woman who’s lost in the woods meets a male owl.
The woman asks,
Do you know where my mommy went?
The owl answers,
How would I know your mommy? Why do women always lose their way in
the woods? Why do women think that animals can speak?
The owl rips open the skin of her face and gnaws her eyeballs.
The eyeless woman becomes an owl.
She becomes a female owl perched on a female tree.
To read Kim’s Phantom Pain Wings is to enter a parallel world in which the agonies of a rigidly gendered society are exteriorized and animated, stripped of polite-society decorum, transformed into a faintly ridiculous yet vicious parable of talking animals, such as a sadistic, mansplaining owl, and interiorized again as a stationary figure, violated and sightless, “a female owl perched on a female tree,” the aggrieved inversion of Minerva’s owl of wisdom and night vision.
Encountering Kim’s work in the powerful translations from the Korean by the poet Don Mee Choi (seven of Kim’s collections so far, plus chapbooks and anthologies of poems and essays) is to be unnerved by the force of their strangeness. With each book I find myself trying to assimilate Kim’s difference, mulling over her poetic strategies and riffling through various critical formulations of uncanniness and originality that I’ve encountered, like Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” or “making strange,” Brecht’s “alienation effects,” Blanchot’s “l’étrangeté commune,” and Harold Bloom’s literary strangeness as a “mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange.” What does it mean to say that Kim’s poetry feels harrowingly strange and original?
For the rest of the essay, go to On the Seawall here.
(Photo of Kim Hyesoon via On the Seawall and Guernica.)