Civil Bound

"Myung Mi Kim is a celebrated and established American poet who has been known to us since the late 1980s. She’s among my favorite poets. I teach her to my students, and I think about her work all the time. She’s one of the co-directors of the poetics program at SUNY Buffalo, which one of the only PhD programs in poetics in the United States. So she’s also an important mentor and teacher. This is a new book. It just became available in October, and I was lucky to see an early iteration. What can I say? It is incredibly powerful and also very sparse—it has very few words. When I teach it to my students, who are undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, they open it and say, ‘There are almost no words in this book!’ We try to work together to understand how the poems become so powerful in spite of the fact of their obvious minimalism. It’s never clear how this operation works: how it is that a poet is able to achieve this effect of power with a very spare style? But that’s this book’s immediate and first characteristic. “It’s not actually a puzzle at all; it’s a reorientation of literacy” What’s it about? I think this book is very much about something. It’s about people moving around the globe, and the ways in which people have been moved around the globe. It ties together a bunch of different documents of the settlement of the American West, including documents of the US government’s development of the Panama Canal. The poems appear sometimes on the page as small phrases or sentences from these actual historical materials. In other instances, they’re arranged in completely new forms by Myung Mi Kim—including a form that looks very much like a crossword puzzle or a word search puzzle. But what’s actually happening is you’re being asked to read from top to bottom instead of left to right. So it’s not actually a puzzle at all; it’s a reorientation of literacy. Myung is Korean-American, so this is also a gesture towards other kinds of graphicity. We’re also being asked to consider the accumulation or dissemination of various kinds of literacies through global kinds of movement. At the very beginning of this book, a snarling dog comes up out of the ocean, and it seems to me that what she manages to achieve in this book is a symphony of different voices that are speaking about the ways in which the postmodern world has been built. There’s also this incredible line, which occurs right smack in the middle of the book on a page all by itself: “If a species cannot find a sonic niche of its own, it will not survive.” It’s a line that really ties together the book’s humanity—its interest in talking to all of us about what it means to live in a world in which people have been torn from their homes, or have voluntarily moved away from their homes and are trying to make new places to live. I think the limited number of words on the page—because it requires us to move so slowly through the thinking that’s happening in the book—also slows down our hardened expectations about the difficulty of moving through a world in this way. Part of being post-postmodern is our expectation around speed and density. She eliminates the possibility of dwelling or presuming that those things are the fundamental requisites of our experience."