Srikanth Reddy in Conversation with Don Mee Choi

Srikanth Reddy first encountered the complex poetic world of Don Mee Choi as a translator of avant-garde Korean poetry before reading Choi’s own poetry. As a poet, Choi invites readers into her personal history—which is also the history of her father and of war. Even if you haven’t read Choi’s poetry, you’ve probably seen the work of her father—a photojournalist who filmed much of the news footage that Americans saw of the Vietnam War and the Cold War era. Choi is at work on a new book, Wings of Utopia, which is the final book in what unintentionally became a trilogy. In Hardly War, Choi set out to explore the dictatorship era of South Korea, but to understand Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship, she felt she also needed to delve into the 1945 national division of Korea, so she wrote a second book, DMZ Colony. Today you’ll hear three poems from the final book, where Choi orbits around her father’s memories as a way to explore the Gwangju Massacre, and what Walter Benjamin called “temporal magic.”