Death Inside Poetry

“After Daddy passed away,” writes Kim Hyesoon, “I called out for birds endlessly.” Out of grief emerged the desire to become a “translator of bird language ... that flies to places I’ve never been.” The eventual result was Phantom Pain Wings, Kim’s thirteenth book of poetry and the eighth translated into English by Don Mee Choi. Like her prize-winning previous collection, Autobiography of Death (2018), a dirge written in the aftermath of the 2014 capsizing of the Sewol Ferry in South Korea that left hundreds dead, Phantom Pain Wings seeks to “receive death inside poetry” even if it means “discarding the notion of ‘I’” and bearing witness to the “death of language.” To speak bird language, instead, requires the poet’s metamorphosis into a vessel of receptivity, “the piece of paper the birds suspended in air stomp on, leaving their footprints”:

Birds have double s dangling from the bottom of their feet
(... Bird waddles by sswaying its butt
and ss pile up in my diary)
(“Double S Double S”)

If part of the poet’s task is to maintain allegiance to “sscribbling/away” even if “literature betrays the readers’ desire to be consoled,” Kim has been at this task since her debut in 1979, concurrent with Korea’s bloody passage between one decades-long authoritarian regime and another. Her poems have always kept close proximity to these and other brutal actualities, close enough to the bomb site to bear the marks of shrapnel after detonation. But entering the poetic state requires a more intimate politics than speaking truth to power. Rather, Kim enters "a blurry state of being," "the state of something yet nothing," an ethos indelibly inscribed with the deaths of others: “Ultimately ‘I’ passes through my language and death and discovers ‘you.’ ... This is the political aspect of poetry.”

Upon being addressed as this you, readers tend to react as if they’d been hit by a truck that at the moment of impact miraculously transformed into the ghost of their mother. Kim's poems are often described as visceral, surreal, grotesque, cruel, comic, feminist, horrifying, and absurd. An apt lexicon perhaps, but one that overemphasizes the cadence of catastrophe. Her poetics also invest in boredom, frustration, and repetition, in the way that life at its most repetitive may most adroitly harbor certain death. To try to describe her work is to try to create a paradigm in which to understand it when, like Roland Barthes’s neutral, the work constantly undoes the paradigm. Death in her poetic universe is not the opposite of life; rather, “we are all part of the structure of death ... we remain living in it.” Language is not opposed to silence, for “poetry awaits where ‘I’ is killed.” I cannot be untangled from you when a chorus of voices is required to excavate grief and the everlasting duty we have to address one another, an obligation that must constantly be renewed:

... I + bird + music say,
This letter is written by our achy hands
we open the endless letter in the distant future
(“Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws”)