Don Mee Choi’s “Geopolitical Poetics”

I am a foreigner who writes in English
Because English is a foreigner like me
I write prescriptions for the injured and the sick
Scribble republic!

from “A Little Confession”

For several decades, poetry has become increasingly visual. It has been about words on a page, letters in space, words & images in relation to each other. Just pick up Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War (Wave Books) and let the pages flip through your fingers. Yes, a few of the pages look like poems “ought” to look like. But most of the pages don’t. There are photographs, tiny ones and full page ones. Drawings. A good deal of the book is written in solid blocks of text that look like prose and a long section that is laid out in the form of an opera libretto. And then there are the lines written in Korean characters, or the excerpts from musical scores (music is essentially a foreign language for me and, undoubtedly, for many readers). Finally, like more and more poetry and fiction titles do these days, the book ends with several pages of explanatory notes, which mostly provide the sources for the many quotations and references the poet has used throughout Hardly War.

The other thing that flipping through Hardly War with your fingers will suggest—and that reading will confirm—is that Choi has carefully thought out this as a book. This is not a collection of assorted random poems on various topics. It’s clear from a quick glimpse at the book that Choi has given herself an awful lot to juggle, so she uses her own biography as the spine on which to hang everything, along with a bare bones history of Korea during roughly the same years—1950 to 1968. Choi was born and raised in Korea, before eventually settling in the U.S. Her father was a photojournalist who covered the war zones across Southeast Asia and in Korea. She uses some of his photographs in the book, and she turns his camera into one of the characters in the opera libretto, “Hardly Opera,” which closes out the book.

Hardly War is a carefully orchestrated sequence of poems, prose poems, and images. It opens with a prose poem “Race=Nation,” which introduces the reader to the poet and her father, along with a few sentences about her idea of folding geopolitics into poetry. It basically serves as her elevator speech on twentieth century Korean history: occupied by Japan from 1910-1945; under the control of the U.S. military government through 1948; authoritarian president who had to be overthrown by a student-led revolution in 1960. South Korea still has not shaken this history off its back even now and we all know what North Korea is like.

“Race=Nation” is followed by “A Little Glossary,” which includes images that aren’t explained, languages that aren’t translated, and the word “gook” which isn’t defined. When we get to the end of the book, the Notes will tell us that these paired photographs show the Taedong River Bridge in Pyongyang, Korea in November 1950 (left) and December 1950 (right), before and after its destruction. Choi’s father, with a camera around his neck, is on the left. The mention of “5 petals” refers to the Rose of Sharon, the national flower of South Korea. On this page, Choi carefully and succinctly sets up the key devices that will she will use throughout the book: pluralingualism, uncertain equivalencies, non-translation, and repetition (of images, symbols, and words).

The first real “poem” of the book is “A Little Menu,” a very simple listing of the foods that an American G.I. might have had while stationed in Korea (e.g. wieners, canned fruit, crackers, soluble coffee, etc.), ending with the line “What did General Fatty eat?”. “General Fatty” is what Choi calls General Douglas MacArthur, who initially led the United Nations military command in Korea. Choi’s confidence in using humor—even silliness—is one of the reasons I have thought about Hardly War time and time again since I first read it nearly six years ago. After seeing black-and-white photographs of soldiers, war-damaged bridges, military equipment, and malnourished or orphaned children, we don’t expect poems that read like nursery rhymes or children’s taunts. This is her “hardly war,” her “faint history<‘ made up of the voices traditionally drowned out by the din of battle. In daring to contrast her “paper closet with real paper dresses in it” against “THE BIG PICTURE. War and its masses. War and its men. War and its machines.’, as she writes in “Woe Are You?” Choi knows that paper dolls and poetry won’t win wars, but that they can help change the way that history is told.

And changing history is her agenda. She wants to correct the stereotyped image of Korea which has been handed down across several generations now, defined almost exclusively by the American experience of the Korean War, even though the war ended nearly seventy years ago. She references two of the Hollywood movies—Pork Chop Hill (1959) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962)—that helped to perpetuate the colonialist trope of of the Korean conflict as the opposition between heroic G.I.s and the native Koreans, who were seen as inept, untrustworthy, and very likely Communists, and who were frequently referred to as gooks, the derogatory word that Americans often used for Asians and other “lower” races. Choi wants to tell Korea’s “own faint history in its own faint language.”

Geopoetics. . . involves disobeying history, severing its ties to power. It strings together the faintly remembered, the faintly imagined, the faintly discarded, which is to say race=nation gets to speak its own faint history in its own faint language. Its mere umbilical cord is hardly attached to anything at all. Hence, hardly=war.

Readers who are bilingual in Korean and English will undoubtedly read Hardly War differently than readers like me who know only one of the languages. But I think that Choi uses incomprehension—which is the first step toward demonization of the Other—intentionally throughout Hardly War.

The book’s narration constantly shifts between sections written in the voices of children, parts written in the pidgin English of Koreans, sections mimicking the pseudo-neutral voice of a slightly gung-ho journalist or newsreel narrator, and a loony version of an opera libretto in which most of the characters are flowers. But what is consistent about all of the voices in Hardly War is Choi’s peculiar sense of humor. She borrows wordplay tactics from nursery rhymes and other forms of children’s poetry to give her writing a slightly sinister innocence. “I was cheerily cherrily red and merely merrily washed my face in the yard and looked up at the stars. I decided to go alone as far as I could go south, do and do and to.” At the beginning of the photo/poem “With My Brother on My Back / I Was Narrowly Narrator” (shown below), Choi writes: “I was narrowly narrator / yet superbly so.” The turnabout from modesty to confidence in a seven word sentence is something I find astonishing.

I wrote about Hardly War when it came out in 2016 and I have incorporated a few bits and pieces from that review in this updated and enlarged piece. Choi’s next book, DMZ Colony, also from Wave Books, won the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. Wave Books deserves huge kudos for the vision, support, and dedication they show to all of their authors.

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Don Mee Choi. Hardly War. Seattle: Wave Books, 2016.

This is book number 4 in my Vertigo 15 Books Project, in which I am looking back across fifteen years of my reading and writing Vertigo, and I am selecting the fifteen titles that have really stood out during that time.

“Explosion of Words” Exhibition in London

Hannes Schüpbach, “Explosion of Words,” detail of image 11 with words from Stephen Watts’ poem ‘For My Friend,
Max Sebald’ (Ancient Sunlight, London: Enitharmon, 2014/2021) © Hannes Schüpbach

Since one of the cornerstones of Vertigo is exploring poetry that includes photographs, a friend brought to my attention the current exhibition in London at Bow Arts’ Nunnery Gallery, “Explosion of Words,” a cinematic photo installation and imaginary library of modern poetry in translation. Here’s what the organizer’s webpage says about it:

“Explosion of Words” is a cinematic photo installation, extending frieze-like over 30 metres of the Nunnery Gallery’s gothic walls, celebrating the power of language. The exhibition is the culmination of Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach’s (b. 1965) response to the lived spaces of east London-based poet and language activist Stephen Watts (b. 1952), who works between extensive research on poetry and his own contributions as a poet and co-translator from many languages.  
Approximately 1600 pages of Watts’ ongoing Bibliography of Modern Poetry in English Translation will be mounted directly onto the gallery’s four-metre-high walls as a background for Schüpbach’s space-spanning photo installation, creating a cosmos of world poetry. Watts’ Bibliography, which is 40 years in the making, will be transformed into a physical experience, creating a ‘storehouse of language’, reflecting Watts’ own passion for poetry in every tongue. In the nave space of the gallery, an excerpt of Schüpbach’s new silent film Essais (2020), with Stephen Watts, will also be on display. 
Watts’ Bibliography opens up perspectives onto the rich wealth of poetry that has been, and still is being, written or performed out of many different histories and environments, as well as exploring the many cultural issues involved in translation.
A two-part artists’ publication has been published to coincide with the exhibition: Hannes Schüpbach: Explosion of Words. Dedicated to Stephen Watts, with an essay by Jo Catling and Stephen Watts: Explosion of Words, 19 Poems, with German translations by Hannes Schüpbach (192 pages, 19.5 × 26 cm, designed by Raphael Drechsel, GREAT, published by Verlag für moderne Kunst, Vienna), available to buy at the gallery.

PLEASE NOTE! Panel talk April 7.

Explosion of Words | ‘An Imaginary Library’: Modern Poetry and Translation Thursday 7 April, 6.30-7.45pm, Queen Mary University of London, £5/free for concessions Join a panel of speakers including Stephen Watts, Hannes Schüpbach, Jo Catling, Chris McCabe and Nisha Ramayya as they dig into the significance of Watts’ Bibliography and its crucial place in a full consideration of modern poetry and translation. (Booking is recommended as gallery space is limited. Book all events online at: bowarts.org/whats-on)

For more information on the exhibition, publication, and programming, check out the bowarts website.

The book Hannes Schüpbach: Explosion of Words contains poems by Watts and photographs by Schüpbach.

Double-page spread from Hannes Schüpbach: Explosion of Words. Photographs © Hannes Schüpbach.

Photo-Embedded Poetry – Where To Start

Page from Don Mee Choi. Hardly War.

Poets have been placing photographs in their books since the end of the nineteenth century, often in the form of illustrations. On occasion, the visual materials that poets have included are actually an integral part of the book’s poetry. In these volumes of poetry, the photographs (or other images) are part of and essential to the text.

In my post called Photo-Embedded Fiction—The Seminal Works, I wrote about the handful of books that have been the most influential for other writers and also for building an audience of receptive readers for this hybrid form of the novel. For a variety of reasons, there isn’t a similar situation in poetry. Looking back over the long history of poetry with embedded photographs, there simply aren’t single titles that have acted as powerful influences on other poets or readers. If any book gets mentioned or talked about with any regularity, it would probably be one of two books by Claudia Rankine, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric (2004) or Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). Both of these are books of poetry filled with images—photographs and reproductions of artworks—and both found a readership far beyond the traditional bounds of poetry fans. But they are both so recent that any influence they have is limited to the last few years.

Instead, in poetry, over the last several decades a few poets have produced title after title of poetry volume filled with embedded photographs. So, it’s more reasonable in this case to speak of a handful of poets than a handful of books. I picked five poets—Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Suzanne Doppelt, Claudia Rankine, and Eleni Sikilenos—whose work probably created the acceptance which exists now for this kind of hybrid poetry. So, I suggest you start with them, along with a very short list of additional titles that are personal favorites of mine.

Image from Susan Howe. Concordance.

Susan Howe. Howe, a graduate of the Boston Museum School, was originally a visual artist, publishing her first book of poetry in 1974. Many of her books include photographs, but the images are often of other texts. These texts are usually handwritten or reproduced from other books, and sometimes they are even folded or cut up. In one of her poems in Concordance (Grenfell Press, 2019), she wrote, “I have composed a careful and on one level truly meant narrative and on another level the Narrative of a Scissor.” Start with either The Midnight (New Directions, 2003) or This That (New Directions, 2010).  Here’s a link to all of my posts about Susan Howe’s books.

Double-page spread from Leslie Scalapino. Crowd and not evening or light: a poem.

Leslie Scalapino. Scalapino, who died in 2010, was a relentlessly experimental writer who often employed photographs, unusual typography, and handwriting in her poetry. The book to start with is Crowd and not evening or light: a poem. (O Books/Sun and Moon Press, 1992), a book-length poem with seventy-six black and white snapshots. It’s a book that constantly allows the reader permission to reassess the very nature of meaning itself. Scalapino doesn’t offer the reader any easy connection between the photographs and the text in her books. She leaves the task of determining meaning up to the reader. I’ve written previously about Crowd and not evening or light. Here is a link to all of my posts on several books by Leslie Scalapino.

Suzanne Doppelt. Lazy Suzie.

Suzanne Doppelt. Like the novelist Wright Morris, Suzanne Doppelt is one of those rare beings who is equally skilled at writing and making photographs. Since the early 1990s she has been exhibiting her photographs and publishing books that mix her poetry and her images. Her poetry often looks like a block of prose on the page, but it definitely reads like poetry and reflects her background in philosophy. Her photographs tend to appear in pairs or in grids of three or more, and the images rarely refer directly to anything in the text. This leaves the reader free to forge their own loose relationships of meaning—relationships between the images themselves and between the images and the text. Doppelt’s books might be said to share one central concern—perception in all its forms. I have written about her books The Field Is Lethal (Counterpath, 2011) and RING RANG WRONG (Burning Deck, 2006) here, but the book I now think is the best place to start is Lazie Suzie (Litmus, 2014), which the poet Eleni Sikelianos says is “a meditation on the senses, and in particular the enchanted lazy susan of the eye.”

Image from Claudia Rankine. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.

Claudia Rankine. Claudia Rankine is quickly becoming a national treasure as she writes about America and racism. Three of her books (to date) include photographs, and you can start with any one of them. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (St. Paul: Graywolf, 2004) is a powerful book about the struggle to find and maintain a moral position, to stave off loneliness and hopelessness, but to not fall prey to what Dr. Cornel West calls the blind and blinding “American optimism.” The most common visual trope in this photograph-filled book is an old-fashioned, mid-century family television set, into which Rankine has overlaid news media images or anonymous snapshots, suggesting the way in which we are confronted daily with a relentless tide of insults and tragedies and deaths that threatens to benumb us while we struggle with our own personal crises. I wrote more about the book here. Citizen: An American Lyric, (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2014) uses photographs and other images to address the racism that is still so endemic in American life and that has permanently stained our history. And Just Us (Graywolf, 2020) focuses on whiteness and white privilege in America.

Image from Eleni Sikelianos. Make Yourself Happy.

Eleni Sikelianos. Eleni Sikelianos has included photographs and other images in most of her books for the last twenty years or so. As is obvious from the example above, she can get very playful with the way she deals with the images in his poems. There are two terrific book choices to start with. The California Poem (Coffee House Press, 2004) is a book-length poem that attempts to give the reader an epic history of California from its glacial past to its rapaciously capitalist present. The book includes photographs, drawings, and a painting. Or try her more recent book Make Yourself Happy (Coffee House Press, 2017), which deals with science, mythology, history, ecology, extinction, and a host of other topics. I wrote more about that title here.

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Page from Don Chee Moi. Hardly War.

Don Mee Choi. Hardly War. (Wave Books, 2016). In Hardly War, Choi blends several languages, photographs, and drawings into a unified whole. She has a distinctive voice that is playful and confident, and Wave Books, as always, has produced a brilliant design that turns Hardly War into a bravura visual performance. Choi was born in South Korea and her father was a photographer and cinematographer who mostly worked in Asian war zones—including the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Choi deploys many photographs by her father in this book. She also borrows wordplay tactics from nursery rhymes and other forms of children’s poetry to give her writing a slightly sinister innocence, and she creates a strange and wonderful mashup of American and Korean cultures. See my longer post on this book here.

Anne Carson. Nox.

Anne Carson. Nox. (New Directions, 2010). Physically, Nox is a stunning accordion-fold book housed in a clamshell box. The poem Nox is comprised of dictionary entries, snapshots, scraps of paper, postage stamps, written memories, and other texts, all laid down across a scroll nearly 1,000 inches long on which we watch Carson cope with the death of her brother, as she tries to comprehend “the smell of nothing,” “the muteness,” and the meaning of memories scattered across a lifetime. Just as the physical book unfolds and then collapses back into itself, the unifying structure of Nox is the unfolding and collapsing of a short poem by the Roman poet Catullus. Nox opens with the poem—known as Poem 101—in Latin. As the scroll/book unfolds, Carson presents us with the individual dictionary entries for every Latin word in Catullus’ poem, along with her slowly evolving English translation of his poem. In parallel with the unfolding/translating of the Catullus poem, Carson examines the meager scraps that constitute her memories and communications with her brother, who lived his life largely abroad and estranged from his family. I wrote more about the book here.

Image from Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Seeing the Body.

Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Seeing the Body. NY: W.W. Norton, 2020. Griffiths’ powerful book deals with the death of her mother, the killing of a black man (Michael Brown) by police, her own rape, and other deeply personal topics. The book also contains a section of photographs entitled “daughter:lyric:landscape” that serves as a visual poem. We understand through implication that Griffiths is using these photographs to look back at herself through her deceased mother’s eyes. Like the novelist Wright Morris and the poet Suzanne Doppelt, Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an extremely talented photographer in addition to being a superb poet. She is known for her self-portraits. I wrote more about her book here.

Andrew Zawacki Unsun.

Andrew Zawacki. Unsun:f/11 (Coach House Books, 2019). Many of the poems in Unsun draw on the terminology of scientific disciplines, not to mention a couple of foreign languages, as Zawacki tackles big subjects like the environment and technology. But mostly, he’s just walking in the fields and woods, thinking deeply. We often think of poetry as invoking mystery or pointing us to that which cannot be spoken, but Zawack’s writing aims at a kind of rigor or exactitude. There are still mysteries in this world, but in his hands they are all the more stunning if seen clearly. One section of Unsun is a series of poems and photographs called “Waterfall Plot,” which is an homage to the ‘Wheel-Rim River’ suite by eighth-century Chinese poet Wang Wei. Each of the twenty brief poems in this suite is paired with an abstract, black-and-white photograph by Zawacki. In these photographs, Zawacki makes the recognizable (an ordinary chicken coop) look otherworldly, turning it into ominous landscapes and skyscapes that serve as the inspiration for each of the poems. I have written more about the book here.

Page from John Updike. Midpoint and Other Poems.

If it’s beginning to seem like using photographs is only for more experimental poets, consider John Updike. Updike, normally thought of as a novelist and short story writer, whose main subject, he once told a Life magazine interviewer, was the “American Protestant small-town middle class,” also wrote a considerable amount of poetry, including one significant poem sequence using photographs. In 1969, he used his own family photographs in a very innovative way in the title poem of his book Midpoint and other Poems (Knopf). “Midpoint” was written “to take inventory of his life at the end of his thirty-fifth year—a midpoint,” halfway toward his life expectancy of seventy. (He lived to be seventy-six.) I wrote more about the poem here.

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You can find all of the relevant posts on this subject simply by clicking on the category Poetry with Embedded Photos. For purposes of clarification, on Vertigo and in my bibliography of photo-embedded literature, I generally ignore the whole world of artist’s books and what is often called visual poetry or concrete poetry, not because I am not interested in them (I am!). But my goal has been to keep the focus on works which seem to me to have their roots in the field of poetry and wish to be judged by literary standards.

You can explore my bibliography of nearly 1,000 title of works of fiction and poetry with embedded photographs by hovering over the pull-down menu Photo-Embedded Literature at the top.

“Don’t Rush”: Andrew Zawacki’s “Unsun:”

Poetry geeks tend to write things about Andrew Zawacki’s poetry like: “Unsun takes on digital networks, international transit, the uneven movements of capital, and the unrelenting feedback loops of data surveillance, weather disaster, war” (from the Coach House Books blurb). In somewhat simpler terms, it’s fair to say that Zawacki is ever alert to all that is going on around him. Most of the poems in Unsun deal with nature, with walks outdoors, through forests, into a “fox field at evenfall.” He is especially attuned to the many ways in which industry and technology are attacking and, often, ruining our environment. “The sky is not falling it’s / failing” (From “Outside a Ruined Casino.”)

Many of the poems in his recent book  Unsun:f/11 (Coach House Books, 2019) draw on the terminology of scientific disciplines, including geology, mathematics, meteorology, and astronomy, plus the fields of medicine, computer programming, photography, and probably several others that I have forgotten, not to mention a couple of foreign languages. In other words, I spent a lot of time Googling things as I read his vocabulary-expanding poems.

We are all on our way
Out don’t
Rush
(from: “U9 to Zoo Station Sonnet”)

My take on these challenging poems is simple: don’t rush. One of Zawacki’s goals is to encourage (i.e., force) the reader to look at things differently. More precisely. More scientifically. This is implied in the book’s subtitle f/11, which represents the f stop, or aperture, of a camera lens. In this case, f/11 suggests a lens in which nearly everything should be in sharp focus.

A glassstar shrieks into
                                   starfall, its falllight
casting enriched uranium
shadows over the ruins

                                  of a city of
lead and cement : an early-
                                 warning satellite chitters, the end
times barely begun, no witness

protection program for any of us.

(from “END_PROGRAM_HELLOWORLD”)

I’d like to steal a short phrase from John Vincler’s recent essay “Grid Logic” (over at the Poetry Foundation), which is about the poetry of Susan Howe. He writes about Howe’s “atomistic attention to units of sound and typographical form.” Zawacki, I think, pays an atomistic attention to every detail—to every sound, movement, cloud formation, color—and he wants the most precise word or phrase for that detail, regardless of what discipline the word might come from. If one word comes from chemistry and the next from metallurgy, no problem. Few readers are likely to fully grasp some of Zawacki’s poems during the first read-through. Nevertheless, by the end of a poem like “END_PROGRAM_HELLOWORLD”, few readers will have trouble recognizing that Zawacki is describing the ecological catastrophe that unchecked technology has wrought on our planet.

Take four minutes and go over to Soundcloud and listen to Zawacki talk about and then read “Gratophoph,” a delightful poem from Unsun written for his young daughter, and I think you’ll see that clarity isn’t everything.

One section of Zawacki’s book is a series of poems and photographs called “Waterfall Plot,” which he says is “lifted from the ‘Wheel-Rim River’ suite by eighth -century Chinese poet, painter, musician, and politician Wang Wei.” Each of the twenty brief poems in this suite is accompanied by beautiful abstract, black-and-white photographs by Zawacki. The photographs were shot at “a compound of disused chicken coops in Athens, Georgia.” In his photographs, Zawacki makes the recognizable (chicken wire, windows, feathers, dirt) look otherworldly. He turns them into eerie, if not ominous landscapes and skyscapes that serve as the inspiration for each of the poems, just as Wang Wei’s poems were inspired by the Chinese landscapes he knew so intimately. (David Hinton’s translation of Wang Wei’s WheelRim Sequence can be read here.)

Here is the photograph and the poem that comprise “Waterfall Plot 2”:

Leaves in the wind a kaleidoscope—developer
amber, hypo pink—and chickens blind, asphyxiated

by contaminated streams. Root canal : ammonium
nitrate and diesel fuel, to fracas a mountain in half.

Photography is typically about framing the world. But in these photographs, Zawacki is mostly concerned with focus and scale. He wants to turn the micro—the grime or residue that has naturally built up over time on a scrap of screen or on a pane of glass—into something that resembles a landscape or skyscape. He uses the science of photography to aid the eye in seeing in more precisely and then he employs the vocabulary of the sciences to articulate more precisely. We often think of poetry as invoking mystery or pointing us to that which cannot be spoken. Zawacki is going in the opposite direction, towards a kind of rigor or exactitude. There are still mysteries in this world, but they are all the more stunning if seen clearly.

Coach House Books has produced an exceptional short video about Unsun that I highly recommend watching. No, it’s not a poetry reading. Think of it as a sort of sci-fi music video for the book’s opening poem “Optic Audio.” The video was edited by Paul Cunningham and the music excerpted from “Ice as the Sun” by the Berlin-based electronic music composer Hainbach.

The poems of “Waterfall Plot” are also available in a chapbook. Waterfall Plot. Greying Ghost, 2019. Chapbook. Limited edition of 100.

Seeing the Body: Poems by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

I’d come into the room & try to write
a different ending on those anonymous walls.
There was less time all the time
until time changed. You know what I mean.

In the poem “Belief,” from her new book Seeing the Body (W.W. Norton), Rachel Eliza Griffiths recounts the frustration of trying to write while waiting in the hospital during the time that her mother was dying.

I tried to read & write. Over & over, I
arranged plain little soaps, toothbrush, & comb.

. . . But before I accepted her
dying, which would be true
five months later, I kept trying to write
my mother a strong beginning.

Seeing the Body is a deeply personal book that was born out of the passing of her mother, the grief that followed, and the eventual return to a new normal. “Seeing” is often the operative word in this book.

Two years later in Brooklyn I am getting my eyes
checked. I have good eyes today. But there were
whole years I couldn’t see. . .                                                                               

                                                             from “Name”

But the real challenge for Griffiths comes with fulfilling her responsibility as a writer. At first, there are only “cobwebs of words” as the poet struggles to get past the reality of her mother’s passing. Words may be gossamer thin but in Griffith’s book they have the power to grieve, to love, to hurl anger, to forgive, to build worlds.

I want my web to hold. I want to repair
what I have made. I was not given the golden hive.
In me seethes the silk of invisible worlds.    

         from “Arch of Hysteria, or, The Spider-Mother Becomes a Woman”

Throughout the book, Griffiths talks of having her mother’s presence still with her (“even now she is still making me”). She misses her mother’s cooking. She thinks about family. She thinks about other artists who inspire her, like Louise Bourgeois and Langston Hughes. She writes a poem to Leonard Cohen (“Where are the miracles now, Leonard?”). She seethes as yet another black man (Mike Brown) is killed by the police in America. And then she herself becomes ill.

. . . There I prayed. I hummed.
alone, half-bald. Being born alone again.

I could not trust such sentences of faith or fiction. Instead, I read
menus, trues crimes, prescriptions. Transcribed
simple miracles for my anxiety.

I could not taste life or honey.

But I could bleed.                                                                                                   

                                                               from “Signs”

But for me, the true core of this book comes when Griffiths knows there are times when she can not be silent. When she must speak for more than just herself. Seeing the Body reverberates with moments of outrage. The most powerful example is the poem “My Rapes.”

I promised my mother I would never speak a word
about my rapes. I would never tell the world.
about my power until she was dead. Her eyes sealed &
having a choice now to listen to me or be a ghost
when I am saying the difficult thing
& lived it. . .

“My Rapes” is “a terrible poem for us,”

we outlaw women who have taken off the silence
of our muzzles & armed our small bones with stars,
we who leap from the attics we are burning down.

In the poem, Griffiths writes not only from her own past (“when I tried to tell my mother about the rapes she asked me / what in the world had I been wearing & where had I gone”), but about the students who have come to her with poems about their experiences, the “typed-up evidence” and “the formatted corpse of a memory that won’t lie still.” It’s not so much a poem about rape as it is about the endless pressures to deny rape, to call rape by a lesser name, or, worst of all, to blame the victims. It’s a poem everyone should read.

Griffiths is also a terrific photographer and she includes a section of intriguing self-portraits in the book in a section called “daughter: lyric: landscape.” She writes: “I am looking at a woman whose spirit is both emaciated and exhilarated in the face of monumental loss.” Self-portraiture is a form of automatic self-distancing, a mirroring of the self. But here, by using the word “daughter,” Griffiths implies that she is also looking at herself through her mother’s eyes. She accomplishes the eerie act of displacement by momentarily trading places with the dead in order to look back at her living self.

Seeing the Body is a book that is tender and fearless and timely. Highly recommended.

. . . When some fucked injustice
smiled & shot into the crowd & said
Y’all need to go back from where you came from.
Well, we stayed and lived.                                                                         

                                                             from “Paradise”

Watch Rachel Eliza Griffiths read several poems from this book on YouTube, courtesy of Poets House.

Littoral/Literal

I been moving back and forth between three books by Forrest Gander recently, looking mostly at the various ways in which he has worked with photographs in his poetry. In Core Samples from the World (New Directions, 2011) there are four poem sequences in which photographs by Raymond Meeks, Graciela Iturbide, and Lucas Foglia are situated. The photographs are each given their own page, so they aren’t really embedded within the text of the poem. Instead, Gander seems to propose that the reader take in the photographs as a visual parallel to his words. Separate but equal. An earlier book, Eye Against Eye (New Directions, 2005), includes a poem sequence entitled “Late Summer Entry: the  Landscapes of Sally Mann,” in which Gander’s poems directly address their visual counterparts on facing pages.

Gander’s newest book, Be With (New Directions, 2018), is riddled with the “searing exquisite singularity” of death. In 2016, his wife, the poet C.D. Wright, died suddenly, and a number of the book’s poems deal with the “grief-sounds” and the “tetric silence” that he experienced after this loss. There is also a long, moving, deeply personal poem titled “Ruth,” about Gander’s aging, failing mother, who struggles physically and has memory issues. His response to familial grief is to write poems that are fractured and disjointed, that abruptly change direction, and have what he calls a “rhythm of farewell.”

For me, the most fascinating work in Be With is the closing poem sequence titled “Littoral Zone” in which Gander presents a combination of words and photographs in a new and more complex relationship than he has previously attempted. “Littoral Zone” has six parts, each consisting of a photograph by Michael Flomen on the left hand page and one section of Gander’s poem on the opposing page. The six sections have subtitles that alternate between “Entrance” and “Exit,” suggesting that the poem as a whole represents the influx and the ebb of the tide that is hinted at by the title word littoral, which, Merriam-Webster.com tells me, is “the shore zone between the high tide and low tide points.” Each of the six written sections of the poem is subdivided into three verse paragraphs, with the center one printed in italics.

There’s a further pattern to these six sections, as I’ll show using the example of the third and final “Exit” section of the poem sequence. The first verse paragraph is essentially an attempt to provide a verbal equivalent for what is visible in the photograph.

Mobbed phosphorescence, gaseous swarm. And breathbeats blazed into an invisible integument. To begin in intimacy on this volcanic tuff. Here to cling.

The middle verse paragraph tends to address the subject of sight or the act of seeing and seems to address the reader.

For though we have no criterion for how to see and are not sure what we are seeing, we are plunged into sensation. As into a novel ache. But what ever has dispassionate description delivered?

And the final verse paragraph shifts into the zone of erotics, with the poet intimately addressing a lover.

Your impact marks
throng the resin
of my mind. Declension
a focal spasm. When your
eyelids release their tension,
nocturnal pods, in-
vertebrate and
membranous, surge
into my dreams. From
afar, do you see me now
briefly here in this phantasmic
standoff riding
pain’s whirlforms?

Gander is poet who is not afraid to cause readers to consult their dictionaries once in a while, but “Littoral Zone” is chock full of specialized terms. (Hands up if you know the definitions of  “pelagic” or “lampyrid” or “levorotatory isomers,” for example.) I think Gander is both insisting on the highest level of precision he can attain and also reveling in wonderful terminology from disciplines that most of us don’t bump up against on a daily basis. I immediately thought of the way in which writer Robert Macfarlane introduces us to the lost or unfamiliar vocabularies of nature when he tweets his “word of the day”.

Flomen’s black-and-white images are about as abstract as something can be that is still recognizable as a photograph. In fact, they are cameraless photograms that Flomen makes using only sheets of photographic paper, moonlight, and whatever he can find in forests or streams, including grass, branches, snow, rocks. He made these images by plunging unexposed photographic paper into a stream or pond and letting water and more solid objects like grasses and pebbles create the images directly on the paper. In other words, nature is literally creating a photographic image of itself.

No matter how many times I read “Littoral Zone” it remains elusive and impossible to grasp as a whole. It’s a poem about the difficulty of knowing and the complex relationship between seeing and saying. I think the challenge he faced when confronted by the abstraction of Flomen’s photographs, knowing that they represent nature in its purest form, seems to have freed Gander. There is barely a hint of narrative to be found in Flomen’s stark images of light and darkness; therefore Gander’s poetic response could be, well, anything at all. And what he chose to do was go “optically active.” He riffs off Flomen’s images to create his own intimate landscapes and bodyscapes.

Struck by the pointlessness of comparison, but what more can one want?
For seeing not to degenerate into habit? And what if the demands for
another kind of seeing cannot be regarded as what we take to be “seeing”? As
one turns away, the retained image vitiates what swings into view.

Ω

In his Acknowledgements, Gander tells us that the sections of “Littoral Zone” were published individually “in earlier drafts” online in alligatorzine. The poems that appear in Be With have been pared down, made even more angular and abstract than their earlier versions. In several cases they have been almost entirely reworked. Here’s the original version of the poem I quoted above, which Gander previously titled “Littoral Zone 19,” and which was 18 words longer when first published:

Mobbed phosphorescence, a gaseous swarm upon which (impossibly) watermarks are stamped, rings clinging to invisible membrane, discrete, unrelated to the (lower) dimension of volcanic tuff, stone sponge, suggesting ground.

But though we have no criterion for how to see and are not sure what we are seeing, we are plunged into sensation. As into a novel pain. And yet pointing to it yields no shred of information.

The privilege of intimacy, a
kind of blackmail, would
face it out, the bally show
glimmerous as a trinket ring
to fetch code in the night
quarter and smell of lavender
may be partly regarded as a sinkhole
where strange laxities prevail on
the strength of what is
going to take place there.

I haven’t said much about the rest of Be With, but Dan Chaisson’s review in a recent issue of The New Yorker nails it.

A Doll for Throwing

“I learned to use a camera to see what I could be.”

Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing is, among other things, a book about photography, but it is also about photographs stolen and appropriated through, shall we say, the arrogance of gender and fame. But first, about the title. It comes from a soft type of doll designed in the 1920s by the Bauhaus artist Alma Siedhoff-Buscher. The doll (or wurfpuppe in German) has a fiber body and wooden head and was meant to be safely tossed between children, but in Bang’s book it takes on an entirely different meaning.

The poems in A Doll for Throwing adopt the voice of Lucia Moholy (1894-1989), the Austrian photographer who met the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin in 1920, during the fraught early years of the Weimar Republic. They married and two years later he became one of the legendary professors at the Bauhaus. To an extent that is not fully known, she taught him about photography and collaborated with him on works for which credit is often given only to him (including the four images reproduced on the book’s cover). They divorced in 1929 and in 1933 Lucia had to hastily flee Germany when her new lover, a prominent Communist, was arrested in their apartment. She did, however, manage to leave her negatives in the care of Moholy-Nagy. When he himself became an emigre, he turned the negatives over for safekeeping to the famous German architect and founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, who proceeded to use some of Lucia’s photographs for decades without crediting her. Once she was established in England, Lucia began a long correspondence to try to regain her negatives from Gropius. In the 1960s, she finally managed to get a limited number of them back, but by then her work had become submerged beneath the reputations of two famous men and she was nearly forgotten to history.

The book opens with an empty rectangle and what looks like an exhibition wall label. The empty frame represents a portrait of László Moholy-Nagy made by Lucia Moholy at the Bauhaus in 1926 and now part of the online collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The poems that follow are written as prose texts and many are titled after photographs by Lucia and other Bauhaus-related artists. If you start searching online to view some of these images, you will quickly figure out that the specific shape of each poem is based on the shape of the original photograph, reinforcing the theme of Lucia’s stolen images.

Collectively, Bang’s poems flesh out a voice for Lucia that is firm and terse and confident. Many of the poems focus on or reference the gender authority drama that is playing out between her and László and Gropius. “Men have reasons for breaking the rules.” But the Lucia Moholy that Bang presents us refuses to let either sexism or exile get the better of her. Instead of regret, she will be elusive, multiple. “I wasn’t a child for long and after that I wasn’t, I was someone else. I was this. And that. A blast furnace, a steel maze inside, the low-level engine room of an ocean liner. My eye repeats horizontally what I by this time already know: there is no turning back to be someone I might have been. Now there will only ever be multiples of me.” Bang sees Lucia as a resilient woman, who repeatedly finds the strength to carry on despite the latest challenge or indignity.

She organizes the world around her—objects, circumstances, works of art, and, always, a glimpse of herself—as if everything were part of a still life.”You should know that I communicate through showing how an objects acts on me.” Objects seem more real, more important to her than people.

One poem plays off of the format of various resumes found in Lucia’s file at the Bauhaus. Here is part of “Last Name First First Name Last”::

First name, last name, studied subject, and also subject. Was employed as something by various. Was married to and with him went somewhere when. When the something moved to somewhere in date, she began to do something. In due course she did something, as well as something.

Bang’s book is beautifully designed by Ken Botnick of Emdash Design Studio in St. Louis. On the page the poems have a Bauhaus appearance with a crisp sans serif typeface and fully justified margins. Note the black bars at the top and bottom of the page, which are so characteristic  of Bauhaus design.

The book ends with a reproduction of an untitled photograph by Lucia that shows the bedroom of Walter and Ilse Gropius at the Bauhaus, a starkly geometic image of an utterly pristine room in which one cabinet door is opened, revealing some of Ilse’s shoes.

A Doll for Throwing (2017) is smart, defiant, absorbing, and linguistically energetic. Another great product of Minneapolis-based Graywolf Press.

“It is how to live”: Eleni Sikelianos

Make Yourself Happy is the fifth book of poetry by Eleni Sikelianos issued since 2001 by the fine Coffee House Press, just north of me in Minneapolis. I’ve been reading and rereading this compelling book for the past two weeks. Kudos to Coffee House Press for turning out a beautifully designed and produced book that is visually elegant and wonderful to hold.

As a poet, Sikelianos like to think big. Her books deal with topics like science, mythology, history, ecology, extinction, and even, as she writes in one poem sequence in this new book, “the history of man.” Previous books have included a nearly 190-page poem dedicated to California (The California Poem) and a book-length biography in poems (You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek)). Sikelianos is also one of a handful of poets who regularly uses photographs in her books, with four of her Coffee House Press books having imagery of one kind or another.

Make Yourself Happy consists of three long poem sequences, followed by two short stand-alone poems. “Make Yourself Happy” is comprised of 39 individual poems.  Superficially, one might say that the sequence explores the many meanings of “happiness,” whether it’s eating croissants in Paris or simply being alive. But Sikelianos is after something far deeper and more complex than that. Slowly but surely, as this nearly 60-page poem sequence evolves, Sikelianos unravels the whole notion of happiness. Yes, there is a true, indomitable form of happiness that “baffles what’s trying to get in” to destroy it, but there are also false states of happiness that are driven by things as simple as the consumption of sugar-filled snacks or the indulgence in drugs like heroin. Heroin, violence, misery, and other decidedly unhappy themes are always lurking in these poems. In one poem, we see happiness used with decidedly Orwellian intent:

In the United Arab Emirates there is now a Ministry of Happiness
“You can be happy as long as you keep your mouth shut.

In a sly way, the title of this poem sequence is a reference to the pop culture and entertainment worlds that are dedicated to making us happy. (Remember songs like “Margaritaville” or “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”?) The poem sequence opens with a version of the photograph that is also seen on the book’s front cover. It’s an ethereal image by Sikelianos’ husband, writer Laird Hunt, that captures the blur of people dancing and snapping photographs at a rock concert (note the snare drum or tom that appears to be floating in the air). The other photograph that appears in this sequence is a nearly abstract video still of a blurry roller skate taken at a roller derby. These two almost delirious images made me want to get far from my desk and buy a ticket to something that had nothing to do with literature.

Happiness is a topic that seems like the slipperiest of slippery slopes, especially for a serious poet. (Search Amazon for “happiness” and notice how many of the titles that pop up are self-help, many of dubious value.) Happiness is practically a cliche, and yet Sikelianos reminds us that sometimes it really is the most simple thing that stuns us into a state of happiness, even if for only a tenuous moment before a new worry sets in.

Earlier
I was feeling the hot sun on
my right hand while
driving it was
making myself happy—a pool of warmth in the webbing between thumb and index
like a Bermuda of pleasure that spread to the whole machine—but
worried
about liver spots

Ω

“How To Assemble the Animal Globe,” the second major sequence in the book, is a 58-page poem sequence structured geographically, continent by continent, eulogizing animals that have been forced into extinction. Sikelianos provides the pieces of an outline globe pattern for the reader to cut out and assemble, creating a globe of extinction, though I doubt many readers will want to deface the book to actually do this. In this “ghost dance of all the animals,” she reminds us through poems and images of what we are losing as we ruin our planet. The images of extinct animals include photographs, drawings, and prints.

The final sequence, “Oracle, or Utopia,” deals with Biosphere 2, a structure in Oracle, Arizona, just north of Tucson, which was designed to be a closed ecological system that would prepare humans for life on another planet. The original project ran into countless technical and human problems (not unlike our own current experiment on Earth) and lasted only two years. (Current news junkies might be aware of the fact that Steve Bannon – of Breitbart News and, now, the White House – was brought in by mega-millionaire and philanthropist Ed Bass to manage Biosphere 2, an assignment that ended in lawsuits, sexual harassment charges, and more. But I digress.) This poem covers some thirty-odd pages and opens with a ghostly photograph spread across two pages that shows the interior of the Biosphere.

“Epode,” one of the two poems the conclude the book strikes me as a summing up of all three poem sequences. The poem begins with the narrator feeling lost in among the roads, self-storage lots, and neon at the outskirts of a city (that seems to be Portland, Oregon), until she suddenly bursts out into the night, “away from Ikea & all.” Here’s the final half of the poem:

Surge & richness

depth    hardiness    color    air
touching
its mouth to all
of us

When you say Us you mean Earth’s

sounds & tint, spikes & curve,
each liquid shape     our very

wilds —

A band rumbles

brightly at the corner, a crowd percolates, someone
has cleared the glitter-
trash off the stage. You
are alive and in
a little shiver between cause & attentiveness, clockwise, counter-, Joy

shouts itself

Ω

Facing this poem is a carefully scissor-cut photograph of Sikelianos’ daughter (also credited to Hunt). Her face and the three hands reaching for her seem to be festively daubed and decorated in blue paint. The goofy, even exuberant shape of the image seems to suggest a geographical outline more than anything else, but it also reminds me of the way in which Sikelianos’ poems are full of phrases and sentences whose meaning can only be intuited (“if I could pull a skillet from your face” or “It’s a watercolor in knots”). Instead of convincing us of their apparent truthfulness through rational means, strange photographs and phrases like these invoke some other more human means of communicating to us. When Sikelianos writes

What I mean and what I meadow
What I want and what I winnow

she comes close to the way that the nonsense of nursery rhymes seems to enter directly into our neural networks, bypassing any vetting process whatsoever.

It’s curious to me that more poets don’t deal with photographs in the same way that they deal with language. Poetry is a process of abusing language, ignoring rules, making the familiar strange, leaping before looking. Sikelianos is one of a handful of poets that I am aware of who has treated photographs in much the same way, by ignoring their original shape and undermining the perception that they accurately depict reality. She’s done this kind of thing before. In You Animal Machine (The Golden Greek) there are photographs that have been cropped to mystify the original subject and in The California Poem Sikelianos used torn and re-collaged reproductions of photographs and paintings to turn those images into poems of their own.

Ω

In closing, here’s her poem “One Way”:

“One way” into these woods
the sign says and
“no parking” as if
I’d want to park my carc-
ass in a patch of snow
a fuzz of white pine sapling says yes yes
in the wind then
no no!     when it says yes
and when it says no make a
go of
it. It
is how to live.

 

“Midpoint”: John Updike’s Pointillist Poem

Engraver and Apprentice, in their room
Of acid baths and photophobic gloom,
Transform to metal dots ten shades of gray…

I have never been a fan of John Updike’s writing, but I have to admit I was really curious when a Vertigo reader mentioned that Updike had published a book of poetry in 1969 that contained numerous photographs. “Midpoint,” the long poem that opens Midpoint and Other Poems (NY: Knopf, 1969), was written “to take inventory of his life at the end of his thirty-fifth year – a midpoint,” as the book’s dust jacket puts it. As it turned out, “Midpoint” was written a few years prematurely, since Updike (1932-2009) lived to be nearly seventy-seven.

“Midpoint” has five sections or cantos.  X.J. Kennedy referred to the poem as “a personal history in heterogeneous parts —terza rima; a family photo album; a celebration in Spenserian stanzas of metals, ceramics, and polymers; Poundian cantos, complete with glosses; and a meditation in heroic couplets…” (April 1993, New Criterion). Each canto begins with an “argument” that sets forth the poet’s own summary of that section. In Canto 1, the “Introduction,” Updike writes of “early intimations of wonder and dread” and opens with the telling line “Of nothing but me, me.” Then comes Canto II, “The Photographs,” which consists only of a brief argument and twenty-one photographs of Updike and his family – grandparents, parents, siblings, himself at multiple ages, his wife (the book came out five years before his divorce from Mary), and his children.

Argument: The pictures speak for themselves. A cycle of growth, mating, and birth. The coarse dots, calligraphic and abstract, become faces, with troubled expressions. Distance improves vision. Lost time sifts through these immutable screens.

Updike doesn’t seem to have made any attempt to make the photographs approximate any poetic form. There is no apparent rhythmic pattern to the way the photographs are placed on their five pages and the only organizing principle is chronology. The photographs themselves, which are reproduced as halftones, are purposefully printed in such a way as to show the dots formed by the halftone screens. (Although, curiously, the halftone dots are strikingly less noticeable on three of the photographs – each of which is a head shot of Updike himself.) At first I wondered if his decision to emphasize the halftone dots might be related to the Pop Art of the time, specifically Roy Lichtenstein. While it is certainly possible that Lichtenstein’s work created an awareness on Updike’s part of the underlying dots in halftone reproductions, Updike’s writing is not at all aligned with the goals of Pop Art. Rather, we should take Updike’s word for it that he sees the halftone patterns as a visual symbol of lost time and as a metaphor for distance. A halftone image – like life itself – is easier to see from afar.

Roy Lichtenstein, detail of Oh, Jeff… I Love You, Too…But…, 1964

In Canto III, “the Dance of the Solids,” Updike echoes the theme that images are comprised of small, nearly invisible units by turning to science to remind us that the entire universe is made up of atoms. “Solidity is an imperfect state” and light “is not so pure.”

How nicely microscopic forces yield,
In units growing visible, the World we wield!

The argument in Canto IV, “The Play of Memory,” announces that: “The poet remembers and addresses those he has loved. Certain equations emerge from the welter, in which Walt Whitman swims. Arrows urge us on. Imagery from Canto II returns, enlarged. Sonnet to father. Conception as climax of pointillism theme. ” Here, eleven cropped versions of photographs that first appeared in Canto II are woven into the poem (although there is one image that seems to be new). The poem also employs typographic devices (bold fonts, arrows, etc.) and simple line drawings. Quotations from Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and photographs are placed throughout Updike’s sex-obsessed canto of  youthful memories (“always sex”). There is a sense of randomness to the many memories that Updike conjures; like pool balls moving around a pool table endlessly clacking into other balls, one memory evokes a new memory, which evokes yet another memory, and so on. The canto ends with an image of the next generation, a photograph of one of Updike’s children rendered nearly indistinct due to the hyper-enlarged halftone dots. Updike’s use of the art historical term “pointillism” is another hint that he is not referencing Pop Art through his dot-constructed images. Instead, he sees the halftone screen more as a corollary to the work of post-Impressionist painters like Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, who were using the scientific theories of visual perception of Hermann von Helmholtz and others as they constructed their paintings from small dabs of paint.

Canto V: Conclusion. “Argument: The poet strives to conclude, but his aesthetic of dots prevents him. His heroes are catalogued. World politics: a long view. Intelligent hedonistic advice. Chilmark Pond in August. He appears to accept, reluctantly, his own advice.”

Reality transcends itself within;
Atomically, all writers must begin.
The Truth arrives as if by telegraph:
One dot; two dots; a silence; then a laugh.

 

Hardly War

I was narrowly narrator,

yet superbly so.

In an essay several years ago for the British magazine Source Photographic Review, I wrote: “if one were to look for the most innovative and challenging uses of photography in literature today, I would point to a handful of contemporary poets who are finding ways to turn visual images into poetic vocabulary, notably Anne Carson, Christian Hawkey, Susan Howe, and Leslie Scalapino.” Today, I would add a number of names to that list, one of which is Don Mee Choi, whose new book of poems and photographs Hardly War (Seattle & NY: Wave Books, 2016) I have been reading and rereading for a week now. Choi pulls off quite a feat by blending several languages, photographs, and drawings into a unified whole. She has a distinctive voice that is playful and confident, and Wave Books, as always, has produced a brilliant design that turns Hardly War into a bravura visual performance on paper. Choi was born in South Korea and her father was a photographer and cinematographer who mostly worked in Asian war zones – including the Korean War and the Vietnam War and she deploys photographs by her father and others in this book.

What I am attempting to do with my poems and my father’s photographs is what I used to do as a child when I stared at my father’s photographs and maps. I’m trying to imagine race=nation,its language, its wars. I am trying to fold race into geopolitics. It involves disobeying history, severing its ties to power. It strings together the faintly remembered, the faintly imagined, the faintly discarded, which is to say race=nation gets to speak its own faint history in its own faint language. Its mere umbilical cord is hardly attached to anything at all. Hence, hardly=war.

This the opening page of the poetry, which immediately follows a brief, mostly autobiographical introduction by Choi called “Race=Nation.” Beginning the book with a glossary feels like a sly joke on books with highly technical terms or many foreign words. The paired photographs show the Taedong River Bridge in Pyongyang, Korea in November 1950 (left) and December 1950 (right), before and after its destruction.  Choi’s father, with a camera around his neck, is on the left. On this page, Choi carefully and succinctly sets up the key devices that will appear throughout the book: pluralingualism, uncertain equivalencies, and repetition (of images, symbols, and words).

Hardly War is pluralingual, employing English (as the primary language) and Korean, as well as the languages of mathematics and music, photography and drawing. Presumably, the visual images are also the most universal of the languages, since many readers will not know both English and Korean and certainly some readers will not be able to read music. So most readers will find that Choi uses language as both a means and a barrier to communication.

Here, Choi builds a kind of unstable linguistic pedestal for the image of the two people and the tank. In her Notes, Choi explains that this photograph is from the U.S. National Archives and shows a young girl carrying her brother in front of an M-26 tank. Choi frequently uses the equal sign, but always in a way that simultaneously suggests and undermines a sense of equivalency between the two sides of the equation. The number 5 occurs several times in the book, often referring to the five petals of the Rose of Sharon, which is the national flower of South Korea.

Readers who are bilingual in Korean and English will undoubtedly read Hardly War very differently than readers like me who know only one of the languages. Choi openly acknowledges that monolingual English readers will be missing something (“I refuse to translate”), but I think that incomprehension – the first step toward the creation and demonization of the Other – is an intentional part of Choi’s writing in Hardly War. In her Introduction, Choi writes: “This is how gook=nation was born. Our race, our national identity, even our clothing became racialized and geopoliticized within the global class war. Therefore, when I was born in the tiny, tile-roofed house, I was already geopolitically raced. Hence, me=gook.”

Gossamer=Blouse and Yankee=Blouse

Warmly greeted one another

I see Ugly=Translators

Yes, Ma’am

Me=Gook

(from the poem “Hydrangea Agenda”)

This page appears three pages after the one I showed previously. The image of a young woman carrying her brother on her back (this time a photograph taken by Choi’s father) serves as a rhyming image for the previous photograph.

The register of Choi’s English voice shifts dramatically throughout the book. There are sections written in the simple, awkward voice of a small child or of a foreigner who speaks a kind of pidgin English. This voice sometimes seems to be playing with the stereotype of the submissive foreigner. Other sections are written in the pseudo-factual voice of a journalist or newsreel narrator, while others – which deal with military topics like the bombs and herbicides (napalm, DDT) dropped over Korea from the air – are written in an almost neutral, scientific voice.

But the most consistent aspect of Hardly War is Choi’s peculiar sense of humor. She borrows wordplay tactics from nursery rhymes and other forms of children’s poetry to give her writing a slightly sinister innocence. (“I was cheerily cherrily red and merely merrily washed my face in the yard and looked up at the stars. I decided to go alone as far as I could go south, do and do and to.”) And she creates a strange mashup of American and Korean cultures, as in the short poem “A Little Menu,” which is simply a list of food items that includes “Wieners,” “Pan-fried Spam with kimchi,” and:

Fudge

or

Radish soup

The page with the seven photo-segments is opposite “Suicide Parade,” a poem about the use of napalm. This hauntingly rhythmic parade of images serves as a visual refrain, recapitulating images that have all appeared in the previous pages. The images (and the people they depict) are fragmented and partially reassembled. but, significantly, fail to make a whole new person. This image made me thing of the futility of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again after he falls off the wall.

Much of Hardly War shifts between traditionally formatted poems and prose poems, but the book ends with a section some forty pages long called “Hardly Opera,” which is written in the form of a libretto for many characters (many of which are flowers), complete with stage directions. The main character in the opera is her father’s Leica Elmar camera. In the three pages of carefully and lyrically placed photographs and drawings that precede this section (two are shown above), Choi gives us a visual poem which contrasts the articles of military-like clothing that her father wore as a combat photographer and the delicate drawings of flower-decorated clothing that Choi made as a child while he was away on assignment. Choi writes:

The photos and drawings are meant to be a key to “Hardly Opera,” or that is how it functioned for me as I was writing it. While my father was in Vietnam, I was busy drawing and scribbling, making outfits for my paper dolls and pretending to write in English.

Check out the excellent review of Hardly War by Rich Smith over at Seattle’s alternative arts & culture newspaper The Stranger.