Articles

A way is open(ed), a hole is made
— Myung Mi Kim, Dura 

In an interview, the poet Myung Mi Kim explains her prosody as a temporal/spatial concept, existing in “the space between time and space”[1] that can be understood only through an experience of the “sensorium” — when “all your senses are involved in understanding.” There is clearly much that needs to be unpacked from such a statement. What does she mean by this inter-temporal/inter-spatial site where her poetry is located? Why is her prosody — her (mis/dis)use of meters, lines, rhythms, beats, sounds, poetic melodies — so “different” and “difficult” (two comments that Kim admits she has received most frequently), and what does this say about her concept of the nature of poetry? How does one overcome ocular-centric tendencies and use one’s breath and ears when reading her poems, and how is this central to the understanding of Kim’s idea of versification? These are, of course, vast questions that have no definite answer(s), but I believe that they lay adequate groundwork on which a study of the Korean-American poet Myung Mi Kim, a veritable tour de force in contemporary American poetry, may proceed. 

The hyphen between the words “Korean” and “American” in the previous sentence, then, would be a good point of departure for a discussion on Kim. In her talk at the fifth KAFSEL conference entitled “Translingual Consciousness: A Meditation in Four Movements,” Kim talks about “the predicament of the hyphen”:

I could be (and am often) variously hyphenated as a Korean-American poet, a Korean-American woman poet, an immigrant Korean-American woman poet, a Korean-American woman poet of the diaspora, a bilingual Korean-American woman poet, and so on. These markers of ethnicity, gender, displacement, migration, and linguistic affiliation, however, tend to reiterate the “purity” of languages, inviolability of nation boundaries, and fixity of categories that elide the complex geopolitical and historical forces that produce these hyphenations.[2]

What is implied through the small punctuation sign of the hyphen is a forced conjoining between two uncombinable languages, cultures, and sociopolitical ideologies. For Kim, a subject who left Korea at the tender age of nine, “Korean” and/or “American” are categories that cannot specifically define her own current position. Though her ethnicity as well as her childhood memories depicted in her poems are both intensely Korean, her Korean language itself is “truncated, stunted, and ruptured,” and thus “something [she] do[es] and do[es] not know or ‘possess’” (F, 30); hence she is a Korean but not really a Korean. On the other hand, though her tongue finds English more effortless to pronounce and her hand finds Romanized alphabet more comfortable to write, she is still an “otherized” figure in the landscape of America because of her Korean appearance; hence she is an American but not really an American. Perhaps this tension between the two categories that are neither equivalent nor selectable to Kim is shown best in the following line from “And Sing We”:

Um-pah, um-pah sensibility of the first grade teacher, feet firm on the pump organ’s pedals, we flap our wings, butterfly wings, butterfly butterfly, fly over here[3]

Here Kim describes a Korean memory, abundant with Korean sounds (“Um-pah, um-pah”) and melodies (“butterfly butterfly, fly over here” being the lyrics of a well-known Korean children’s song) in an anglicized mode, but this instance is much more than a mere transliteration. If transliteration is an act that is linear in its dynamic and is based on the assumption that there is a fixed co-relation between word A and word B, what is taking place here is significantly different from such an act in that a communication of languages is occurring. It is not so much a “tension” between two words and/or phrases that is taking place, than it is an act of what Kim refers to as a “hybridization” of language, a formulation of a third linguistic mode C through the dialogic interaction between language A and language B, in her case English and Korean: “I am constantly aware of this particular English I participate in — perhaps an English that behaves like a Korean, an English shaped by a Korea.”[4] Thus Kim can be seen acknowledging how languages are continuously influenced by other languages, whether it be through emulation or repulsion, and through this process, “the spectral, the remaindered, the asymmetrical, and the incommensurable in traversing languages and cultures” (F, 30) is revealed. The “residual” material that emerges from this process is what comes to compose the language of languages, namely the language Myung Mi Kim aspires to transcribe and enunciate in her own writing.

For Kim, then, capturing the access to a language that is both permitted and denied becomes the site of attention she wishes to delineate first and foremost in her poetry:

So, in this effort and failure of bridging, reconfiguring, shaping, and being shaped by loss and absence, one enters a difficult negotiation with an Imaginary and a manner of listening that to me is the state of writing. (JKL, 95)

Writing for Kim is an act that occurs in the interstices and/or ruptures of languages and cultures; it is the ongoing “effort[s] and failure[s]” of narrating the “spectral” and the “incommensurable” that have been unseen/dismissed by so many other writers in the past that characterize Kim’s poems. She accepts the trauma of her displacement and her diasporic positioning and utilizes it to examine how “the space between the two languages [becomes] a site of mutation between an English and a Korean” (JKL, 94) and thus a hybridization of language occurs. This third space Kim’s prosody finds itself located on is a space that is situated on the process of “languaging,” on the intersections of temporal and spatial construction.

“Languaging,” then, as Kim explains, “is a practice of language that reconfigures legibility, intelligibility, and sense-making by heeding the liminal — the not-yet-available to culture” (F, 31).[5] If “language” implies a conforming to a fixed set of rules and is judged according to whether it has been mastered or not, “languaging” — language as an ongoing act of (re)creation — is a process which accepts that there can never be an either/or situation when it comes to lingual orality and/or textual legibility. Through this process, language “factors in, layers in, and crosses fields of meaning, elaborating and extending the possibilities for sense making,”[6] and it is this continuous fluidity and subsequent polysemy of language that enables “[a] measure, a page, the book to embody the multivalent, the multidirectional — a cathexis of the living instant” (Commons, 111). In other words, for Kim it is the incommensurability of language that both limits and legitimates one’s recognition of his/her present space at the moment. Because language is always approximate, and “diction(s), register(s), inflection(s) as well as varying affective stances … have and will continue to filter into [language]” (Commons, 110), it can never comply to the demands for a linearly coherent history nor a narrative that can be encompassed by all. In this way it is limiting. But it is also liberating in that, through “languaging” one is able to express an individual experience, to make visible the invisible, to let the unheard be heard through nonteleological enunciations. I believe this is precisely what Kim strives to articulate through her poetry.

How, then, does this idea of language as an activity manifest in Kim’s poetry? An instance where the “lyric as it embodies the processural” (Commons, 111) and the ongoing act of languaging is depicted by Kim can be found in the third part of “The Bounty”:

attenuate	in measure and in collusion separate and bound	wrench
mill	by nine entries in the figure of nine propertied	cell
given	by nine entries in one acre shallow well and pump	force
familiar	hairy snouts arrows in wealth parade of gifts	precisive
bestiary	rain soaked evergreen	tooth
reflex	note circles heat swelling	need
root	familiar dipthong again siege	defer
temper	wrench its nature alloy encumbering	pool
espouse	quality of light mineral	dulled[7]

This is only the first page of part 3; eight more pages continue in exactly the same format — three pillars of words placed in three rows (except for the last page, which is to be discussed in detail later on in this essay). How is one supposed to read, moreover understand, this passage? Of course the obvious answer would be that there is no definitive interpretation, and as Kim always emphasizes, “confusion [can] be productive … [as] reading and poetry are sites of self-reflexivity, even if they fail.” In other words, it is the process of reflexivizing that Kim valorizes, and there are various possibilities of such an act of languaging that can occur here. A reader, for instance, could read the words/phrases line by line, from left to right: “attenuate / in measure and in collusion separate and bound / wrench / mill / by nine entries in the figure of nine propertied / cell.” The thought process starts in medias res with forceful imperative verbs that seem to command the reader to participate in actions of violent pounding and weakening (“mill,” “attenuate”), twisting (“wrench”), and tying up (“bound”). What is being separated and beaten to a pulp, so as to be fragmentized to the minimal size of a “cell” is yet to be revealed. The second column on the following page, however, provides a hermeneutic opening: “village home for bridal bequest fish by dozens to fry” … “proffer armfuls of just pressed noodles” … “ivy and clematis unhurried / one and one conjoined” (The Bounty, 92). By ceasing to read from left to right, and applying a vertical reading, from the top of a respective column to its bottom, an environment of patience and generosity can be seen to be depicted, which is juxtaposed with the brutal violence drawn on the previous page. While the piercing sounds of “wrench / cell / force / precisive” are accentuated in the third column of page 91, more rounded out sounds, in the form of “o” — “threshold” … “rotation / born” — occur on the third column of the following page. Thus a shift in the poem’s mood is brought about through not only how the poem is textually approached by the reader, but also through how the reader aurally voices the poem itself.

There is also a contrast that emerges in the imagery: the “unhurried” (92) sense of the past, where communal rituals of “hairy snouts arrow[ing] in wealth parade of gifts”[8] (91) and meals of “armfuls of … noodles” along with “fish by dozens to fry” (92) on wedding days, are suddenly forcefully ceased; “the property of daughters” (96) ends up having to resort to sparse resources (“shallow well and pump” [91]) and even endure a surrender of language — “familiar dipthong [sic] again siege” (91). Hence the vowel diphthongs in the left column (“familiar,” “bestiary,” “espouse”) are “in measure and in collusion separate[d]” (middle column) to become a “cell” (right column) and/or its “nature” is “wrench[ed]” (middle column) as its “alloy [is] encumbering” (middle column) and thus meaning is “force[fully]” (right column) extracted. What we see here is not only how language that once “bloom[ed]” in the “fertile” “unctuous hills” (92) is grinded, “dulled,” and “defer[red]” (91) by external forces, but also how the middle column acts as a phrasal bridge that connects whichever word on the left with whichever word on the right, thus enabling numerous chiasmatic readings to be possible. If the interpretation focused on a convergence towards the word “need” (right column), then the ominous reading of a language “wrench[ed]” out of its due environment would be overturned, and one would be able to assume that the reading is actually championing a “need” for redemptive measures, thus tinted with a more optimistic hue. This myriad of polysemic interpretations is especially apparent in page 98, where Kim writes, among other words, “resilient” and “bare” on the right column. Whichever action in the left column (“envision” / “recitation”) and phrasal bridge in the second column (“her, and reading” / “object and word”) is used, the meaning of the resulting line will differ greatly. Compare, for instance, “envision / object and word / resilient” and “envision / object and word / bare”; while the former opts for the possibility of language, the latter rejects it and thus the “bare” ends up sounding inconsolably hollow.

As noted earlier, the final page of the poem is drawn out differently from the previous pages, with its disorganized form and erased/missing parts of the column:

ground	its own property chemical and	fiber
	bricks    free    of straw	reading
acute	alter           primacy
jaw	strike	fluent
	firmament	method
sinew	brush    mound   and   gravel
	synaptic
	unruly enter

(99)

Gaps occur in the columns that were, in previous pages, so meticulously formed to perfection with nine words on each left and right column and nine phrases in the middle. Here, in not only the final part of the poem but the final page of the book itself, the reader’s participation is maximized through the processural space of languaging opened up by the poet. The “synaptic / unruly enter” may, as Kim points out, “fire or misfire, connections can be constituted or dismantled [and] no conclusions are possible” (JKL, 101). However, it is because the blank spaces can resonate a sound of their own, according to the voice the reader hears from it, that “the synapse of language” and the “perpetual motion toward the beginning and not necessarily toward knowing” (JKL, 101–102) is deemed so important in Kim’s poems. Both the words/phrases and the gaps are like tesserae that create a textual mosaic according to the method of languaging the reader implements, thus producing a different picture for each respective process of cognitive organization. Kim’s third space of language, then, becomes an inter-temporal, inter-spatial plane on which not only the writer participates in the act of creating her own language, but where also the reader joins in the act of writing as well; the act of languaging becomes a joint endeavor.

It is important to explain, at this point, why Kim locates herself in the spaces between languages and finds it impossible to recite her story in a putatively conventional way. For Kim, the story she wants to tell about herself is a specifically personal one, meaning that it is one that cannot follow the narrative trajectory that has been traditionally agreed upon nor be transcribed with the tools of an accepted storytelling mode. If there has been an assumption (or at least an agreement) between the writer/transmitter and the reader/recipient that the historical continuum is linear and exists on a single plane, in Kim’s poems such an assumption ceases to exist. It is only though the refusal of chronological linearity that migratory, diasporic, and traumatic experiences can be faithfully written out. As she remarks in her own talks, this is the only way she can “show a respect” to her own particular specificities. The polysemic reading of the three columns, whether it be from left to right, from top to bottom, or in the form of chiasmus, is, essentially how Kim understands her own fragmented experiences and thus the only way she knows how to write it out in paper.  

Her experimental uses of meters and rhythms can further be seen in “Hummingbird,” a poem included in Dura (1998). In the following passage the reader is able to experience Kim’s own modification of the caesura, here visually re-created to divide and/or connect syntactic phrases and meanings:

Argue:   precedents,   oaths,   public record,   witnesses
Deliver:   introduction,   narration,  statement of the case,  and  peroration
The   writing   hung   on  the   wall]        [whose  writing  is it
Meal   means:   stuff,   material
Hummingbird    happens   as   a   sound   first
Is  it  clear]      [then   it   is
Heal]     [landed   parole
Continuous,  as  of   line   or   time
A    perceiver  without   state (100)

In the lines “The writing hung on the wall]  [whose writing is it” and “Is it clear]  [then it is” the brackets — and the space between — act as visualized caesuras that not only break or interrupt the flow of thought but act as, to quote Kim’s explanations, “a pivot.” Kim defines her use of the caesura as a device similar to the “hinge,” for it is a “break in the measure [that] travels both ways … like sense breaking and joining simultaneously.” If a caesura in traditional English verse were simply an audible pause used to break up the line, Kim’s caesura acts as a transhistorical space where the line not only shifts forward but thrusts backwards as well: one sees “the writing hung on the wall” and subsequently asks, “whose writing is it[?],” but this question sends one back to look at what is written on the wall once more, and the process is continued over and over again until an answer is deduced. But can there be an answer? Do we know whose writing consists the language of “precedents, oaths, public record, witnesses,” not to mention the formulaic linguistic modes utilized when “deliver[ing]” an “introduction, narration, statement of the case, and peroration”? For these are all static forms of language that were concocted and solidated before we even learned how to speak our own first words. We have been seasoned to believe that language is resolute and knowledge exists in corresponding equivalents, and this is shown through the use of colons. A:B means that A and B are correlated, and therefore “meal” is automatically linked with “stuff, material.” But this is far from how language truly exists for the poet and moreover ourselves as well; “meal” does not necessarily share a relation with “stuff, material,” and the words and language used in “argu[ments]” and “deliver[y]” are not commensurate to the actual experience itself. This is what Kim means when she writes “Hummingbird happens as a sound first,” for it is never the written words but the resonating sounds that can be most truthful to the re-enunciation of the experience. Hence the question “whose writing is it[?]” naturally shifts to “is it clear[?]” for clarity (the basis for transmission/communication) is of more importance than the actual writer — if it is sincere toward expressing the truth, “then it is.” In this sense, through this use of an end-stopping and simultaneously open-ended caesura, Kim emphasizes the “perceiver without state,” always in the fluid process of experiencing without the linguistic means to re-create his/her perceptions. Experience, for Kim is “continuous, as of line or time” and she strives to implement language as an “instrument for gauging, approximating, and rendering” (JKL, 103) the ever-changing world and her own specifically shifted/shifting position in the “clear[est]” way she can.

It is Kim’s aforementioned attention toward the sounds of experience and language (“Hummingbird happens as a sound first”), most prominent in part 1 of “The Bounty,” that makes her poetry so rich in its portrayal.

Lilacs   to   the   post   foretold
Learning   fetch   of   water
                    ranges   lingering
Funnel   thirty
                    merges   temporial   wreath

For shelter the pounding sheet rain	ponder shir rain roof
Hovers it starts start over field and plain	mute forging how compass
Locate a thousand arrows deciphering one	degree salted (down)

By granite specked by pink	fraction to aim so
Uterus as uphill child’s heartbeat	repentant am in
Distinct from awash of mother blood	rimless to whole

Without specifics, wind	broken participle
Pins joints held forth	two a nestle axis to tunnel
As axis what revolves	three behest insistence

Lilacs   to   the   post   foretold
In   the   first                           in   three   as
Signal   and   hook               fey                       lingual
                                                                                (The Bounty, 67)

Kim remarks that she when she wrote this she was able to hear the five columns “more or less simultaneously,” as if five voices were speaking all at once. Her focus on the “materiality of language” in which “[e]very world, every syllable—each sound, each rhythm jostles meaning, contributes to meaning-making” (F, 32) enables a prosody of the polyvocal to materialize. Poetry for Kim is no longer limited to the confines of the page, but rather, its lines are able to sonorously resonate in a cognitive space created by a sensorium — a place where sensory reception and interpretation all converge. Using one’s ears to hear the reverberating “r” sounds in the lines “For shelter the pounding sheet rain” and “ponder shir rain roof” when spoken at the same time, or breathing out the spaces between “Learning fetch of water / [    ] ranges lingering / Funnel thirty / [    ] merges temporal wreath” to feel the slow movements of “lingering” and “merg[ing]” occurring here is the way one needs to experience Kim’s poems, for they tend to demand a synesthetic application of senses. “The essence of poetry,” Kim explains, “lies in what emerges at that very moment of encounter with the written text, with your ears, body, psyche, historical condition.” Reading and writing, speaking and listening all become acts that not only Kim partakes in, but acts she urges the reader to join in as well, so that language can reach its potential of dialogism to the fullest degree, and so that the process of communication can be observed.

In this sense, Kim’s own personal experience becomes a metaphor for the possibilities of language itself: her loss of language (Korean), her newly acquired but still awkward new language (English), and the third space on which she can only reside in her linguistic endeavors becomes analogous to what all experience in today’s world, where the locus of enunciation is ever-shifting and the belief in a historical continuum — where experiences can be faithfully expressed — is questioned. For Myung Mi Kim, who often finds it difficult to find by herself an exact word to replicate an experience — “Hummingbird  No word for its size” (Dura, 94) — writing becomes an act that is simply a part of a larger process in “the language of languages, the communication of communications” that she so emphasizes. The ideal reader of her poetry is not one who extracts meaning from the text, but one who accompanies it and the process in which it was created. The third space erected for the progression of understanding and/or language is what needs to be acknowledged by those who endeavor to both study Kim’s poetry and participate in the translingual experience.

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Notes

1. An interview with the poet was conducted on June 18, 2009, at the Ewha Womans University BK English Lab, thanks to the generous efforts of both the BK and HK organizations. Unfortunately, as the interview content has yet to be published, all remarks referred to will be missing paginations. The full transcript can be provided on demand.

2. From the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of the Korean Association for Feminist Studies in English Literature, held June 12–13, 2009, at Ewha Womans University, 30. Hereafter cited as F.

3. Myung Mi Kim, Under Flag, 14.

4. From James Kyung-Jin Lee’s interview with Kim included in Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, 94. Hereafter cited as JKL.

5. All citations of “F” refer to the proceedings of The Fifth International Conference of the Korean Association for Feminist Studies in English Literature, held June 12–13, 2009, at Ewha Womans University.

6. Kim, Commons, 110.

7. Kim, The Bounty, 91.

8. It is Korean tradition to place a head of a pig on a table at the beginning of a financial endeavor (such as an opening of a store, the first day of planting crops, etc.), and put money into its mouth as a way to pray to the gods for success.

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Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. “Images of Form vs. Images of Content in Contemporary Asian-American Poetry.” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 4 (1996): 764–89.

Chiu, Jeannie. “Identities in Process: The Experimental Poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Myung Mi Kim.” In Asian North American Identities Beyond the Hyphen, edited by Eleanor Ty and Donald C. Goellnicht. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. 84–101.

Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. “Speaking in Tongues: Myung Mi Kim’s Stylized Mouths.” SLI: Studies in the Literary Imagination 37, no. 1 (2004): 124–48.

Kim, Elaine. “Korean American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Cheung. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 156–91.

Kim, Myung Mi. Under Flag. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1991.

———. The Bounty. Minneapolis: Chax Press, 1996.

———. Dura. New York: Nightboat Books, 1998.

———. Commons. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Lee, James Kyung-jin. “Interview with Myung Mi Kim.” In Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok Cheung. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. 92–104.

Liu, Warren. “Making Common the Commons: Myung Mi Kim’s Ideal Subject.” In American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics,edited by Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007. 252–66.

Park, Josephine Nock-Hee. “‘Composed of Many Lengths of Bone’: Myung Mi Kim’s Reimagination of Image and Epic.” In Transnational Asian American Literature: Site and Transits, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim, John Blair Gamber, Stephen Hong Sohn, and Gina Valentino. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 235–56.

———. Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Xiaojing, Zhou. “‘What Story What Story What Sound’: The Nomadic Poetics of Myung Mi Kim’s Dura.” College Literature 33, no. 4 (2007): 63–91.

———. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.

———. The Ethics and Poetics of Alterity in Asian American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006.

— Three Desks —

Myung Mi Kim said, “Let’s make lists of all of our discursive writing and look at those lists.” I began a list soon lost under piles. In the intervening years the bit of edification, the muzzle, gag and tethers of training that determined much of what fell to that list have remained of interest while the sign of the “discursive” under which the list accreted has become increasingly perplexing.

There are daily occasions that provoke response or invitations that require address. Vigilant against the learned behavior of automatic response yet immersed also in a porous need-world in which adrenaline calls the mother, whether or not she has children, before or after, to tend to the call.

The call is not the song. The Latin obaudire, hearing from below — obeying.
                                        — George Albon

Here enter the imaginal and actual laws that authorize kinds of public discourse by kinds of public bodies. The bit and muzzle and their company surface at the moment of the call, as if address requires some kind of redress too: obedience. The writing that escapes seems to be poetry.

Years ago, unable to confine myself to the dissertation writing at the computer on my desk, I put a table to my right and another behind me. The one to the side was a repository for writing related to the topics of the dissertation but occurring in an idiolect different from that of the academy. What I recognized as poetry, sometimes related to the dissertation topics and sometimes not, fell to the third table behind me.

Starting before the occupation of the dissertation chamber and continuing long after that triangulation, an attempt to repeatedly take resistance and desire, to write not only about them, not issue only from them, and also not ignore them.

I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from — and in what disables the foray.
                                        — Toni Morrison*

Perhaps for some an academic discourse is native, without ambivalence, or easy to learn. For me it was none of those. 

Help arrived as the learning and re-learning, the consecutive and simultaneous ordering and disassembling of one posture after another — perhaps a brain patterning via the body? — of the t’ai chi form:

Question 4: To withdraw is then to release, to release is to withdraw…but what is “in discontinuity there is still continuity”?

Answer: Discontinuity is the physical form and continuity is the i (mind). It is like a broken lotus root with the fibers still connected. In Chinese calligraphy the stroke may be broken, but the mind is still connected.
                                        — T’ai Chi Classics

T’ai chi arrived as a kind of third apprehension: not poetry, not academic discourse — but linking and partaking of some of both of these, and more. An embodied instruction in sequence and phrase that is and is not sequential. No surprise when you think of the Greek for discourse invoking the body in the act of twice bringing or throwing the discus, thus as a measure, like foot size, diskoura δισκουρα of distance. Or if you listen to the many contradictory definitions for the word discourse in the OED, some excoriating, some invoking the body and the household. Or think of diosakis διοσακις, poet., adv., twice over.

That worked and later unworked — re-broken lotus root with the fibers still connected — writing that became the dissertation, later became a book — not of — but partaking of poetry. The hope to address the requirement and desire to learn a particular vocabulary, taxonomy and comportment of thinking and speaking with its rules of inclusion and exclusion and to simultaneously consider the valences of silence and other kinds of thinking and utterance — these efforts to practice forms of discontinuity in continuity continued beyond the three-desk scene. Training to become an academic or a car mechanic or a ten-year-old cotillion dancer requires practice in particular etiquette, ethics and manners. Usually training to become a specialist makes one a specialist in correct etiquette. Once in a while someone also becomes thoughtful and curious, or a bacchic dancer within or beyond the waltz.

WHAT IS IT YOU HAVE COME TO TELL ME?

Ultimately, the good reason of our refusal to censor or to “correct” is that we seek not to get rid of what embarrasses us or what does not seem true to our lights but to go beyond embarrassment — beyond shame or disgust or outrage — to imagine in an other light, to see in a larger sight what we had rather was dismissed from view.
                                        — Robert Duncan

We might wish for a fugitive writing but all writing, including poetry, must contend in some way with the reign of the discursive — even if only to attempt to ignore or subvert its rule.

Yet maybe this institution and this inclination are but two converse responses to the same anxiety: anxiety as to just what discourse is when it is manifested materially, as a written or spoken object.
                                        — Michel Foucault**

In the realm of our current academic or medical or legal discursives, in which “proceeding by reasoning or argument” is the prevailing use of the word, one who refuses or is unable to be trained to tolerate the rigors of correction, the bit of edification, is often viewed as deficient — or she is regaled as a “real” Poet, having “escaped” via a royal road called “inspiration.” This divide we inherit and in which we live takes me back to one of its origins in the Ion: “for not by art does the poet sing but by power divine … God takes away the minds of poets.” The current discursive trains for meaning minus exhilaration. Thinking minus music.

Poetry and music are both patterns of sound drawn on a background of time. … Whatever refinements and subtleties they may introduce, if they lose touch altogether with the simplicity of the dance, with the motions of the human body and the sounds natural to a man exerting himself, people will no longer feel them as music and poetry. They will respond to them, no doubt but not with the exhilaration that dancing brings.
                                        — Basil Bunting

We could think of poetry and music as elements of a kind of thought that involves voices issuing from bodies in motion. A sequence of actions, something like a dance or embodied incantation. Each step across the page might propose a measure of distance. A foot equals a sound unit or sentence. Invitation to a choreography of relation — the proximity of bodies — in a room doing the t’ai chi form — a call, body to body, like seaweed waving to currents in the air, or following the space of the page before word, each posture a hexagram, a sequence taking letter shapes — a form of thought and address —

What is it you have come to tell me?

— Address — 

In the difficulty, there is no other to address but address itself.

If I could begin this is where I would begin.

Investigating these gags and tethers that attempt to keep us from violating the conventions of discursive utterance. That is investigating what we think we know about what thinking looks and sounds like — and should — this is the labor of a reflexive and reflective discourse.

All research is crisis. What is sought is nothing other than the turn of seeking, of research, that occasions this crisis: the critical turn.
                                        — Maurice Blanchot

The turning back to look — to have recourse — does not turn one into a salt pillar.

Looking at the curse as it has been inherited through the social and the family over generations, as in, “You made my grandfather eat his children in a stew [Pelops] and therefore I will now kill you in revenge” and on and on for generations of blood-letting. Discourse as a kind of revenge, inheritance, heritage of bloodletting, that occurs in some academic and other cultural conventions, under the sign of which, the slaughter of what came before, one kind of looking back, is recognizable as the work of correction and improvement called contribution to the present.

Is there a way to talk, read, write within the social fabric, canon, family without continuing blood feud? — Is there a course that doesn’t lead, as it did for the Erinyes, Medea, Antigone, etc., to the punishment and shelter of the law of the polis? The banishment of the speech of the Furies to the hearth safely imprisoned inside the house?

The crisis of “the critical turn” is always present and always collapsing response, call, poetry, criticism, event, recollection. Always looking back at that second of a death, an origin, an invitation.

Marcel said they were incapable of establishing priorities. In fact their priorities were simply different priorities: value was assigned to all events equally but serially; what was going on at the moment — Aziz’s [murder] trial, a stray chicken — had top billing. Neither event would have a lasting hold on them. Special fondness was attached to those incidents and persons with the greatest dramatic possibilities — that is, with a continuing, endlessly repeatable and improvable life in the imagination: memory of a kind.
                                        — Isabel Fonseca

In place of subordination, imagination. Like incantation — not without cause and effect as one can repeat one thing and something else may occur as a result. One could engage a telling memory of the remembered unfolding present that prioritizes that of “greatest dramatic possibility” and enacts the critical turn as ratiocination of a kind. Lyric might be of high priority in a response to the continual crisis of seeking.

Lyric has no sound but recalls sound. … The way a promise is an action made in speech, not in the sense of something scriptable or repeatable, but something that “happens,” that “occurs” as an event and can continually be called upon … in the unfolding present.
                                        — Susan Stewart

At that second of the sound of the call, writing poetry is a promise that involves the desolation of the impossible charge. The enactment of a coherent public face that the discursive seems to demand puts me in a different state of desolation.

I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.
                                        — Michel Foucault

In some poetry the writer dwells on the desolation wire of the impossibility of writing within/while writing. Passing from premises to conclusions in the discursive mode we are taught to act, to masquerade as if writing is possible — without obstacle, as if we are not our own obstacle — as if the assignment to convey meaning, argument, language as tool in service of that, can be met.

Is the desolation wire the phatic place where the song eclipses, overshadows, devours, extends beyond the call? Phatic as in phanein φανεροs to show, to appear visible — even if in disguise. Does, can, a wounded and double-faced, doubt-filled, unfaithful to orders, faceless, full frontal critical writing exist?

If it could, would we be able then to burn the need for the distinction between the discursive and other writing?

What is always at work in discourse — as in everything else — is desire and power. … This is why discourse, at least since the rout of the Sophists by Plato, always unfolds in the service of the “will to truth.” Discourse wishes “to speak the truth.” but in order to do this, it must mask from itself its service to desire and power, must indeed mask from itself the fact that it is itself a manifestation of the operations of these two forces.
                                        — Hayden White

Whose “truth” does which discourse wish us to speak, to serve up, to write?

— Third Apprehension —

All reasoning is carried on discursively; that is discurrendo, — by running about to the right and the left, laying the separate notices together, and thence mediately deriving some third apprehension.
                                        — OED

Plucking from the definitions which themselves are laden with so much contradiction: invoking the inherent of the incoherent.

A subject of ‘discourse’ or reasoning (as distinguished from a subject of perception)
                                        — OED

Perception as a kind of reason? 

To lift the ancestral curse from this House of Atreus and turn it on itself.

Here the reflective recursive appears as the chorus that provides “another side to … conception,” even another kind of conception.

And, of course, s/he might begin with the writing. S/he might try to put the whole dialogue in new writing, the field of another kind of voice than those we have heard before. A help-ful, in-forming voice, a voice eager to reach and accept the other’s voice. Already in chorus, or eager to reach for chorus. It might get started like that. Any day, it could begin like that. Any day it could begin.
                                        — Nathaniel Tarn

The intolerable restrictions of the drama could be loosened, however, if a means could be found by which what was general and poetic, comment, not action, could be freed without interrupting the movement of the whole. It is this that the choruses supply; the old men or women who take no active part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception.
                                        — Virginia Woolf

As legend has it the first actor, the “hypocrit,” was Thespis, the first to appear on stage as a “character” of a written play instead of as “himself,” as a writer. He was also the first to exchange words with the leader of the chorus. The υποκριτηs, the hypocrit could be enlisted to appear on our current discursive stage as the figure who addresses and provokes “the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception.” Hypocrit from Hypokrisia Υποκρισια — of stringed instruments, answer in sound, i.e. sound in harmony with, to play an accompaniment. This hypocrit, being (at least) two-faced, could begin to “in-form” as Tarn suggests, begin to reach for a chorus that has already begun, to seduce and aggravate that chorus into more comment, summary, and more sides to conception.

The hypocrit talks with the chorus who talks to the audience. They all need each other to stay with/in the play. When the reader talks with the writer, is the reader the hypocrit or the chorus or the audience? The performance by all involves answering, harmonizing, assessing, contradicting: in short, interpretation — critical turns, a turning into, and turning from and toward heard and written passages.

One must be able to pass easily into those ecstasies, those wild and apparently irrelevant utterances, those sometimes obvious and commonplace statements, to decide their relevance or irrelevance, and give them their relation to the play as a whole.

We must be able to ‘pass easily’; but that of course is exactly what we cannot do. … But we can guess that Sophocles used them not to express something outside the action of the play, but to sing the praises of some virtue, or the beauties of some place mentioned in it.
                                        — Virginia Woolf

It might not be possible or desirable to resuscitate, reconstitute, or intervene in the orders of the discursive under whose reign we live, but it could be possible instead to enlist it, turn it into, turn to it as a recursive chorus that doesn’t express something “outside the action of the play” (or the poem, or thinking) but reflects on and joins in singing “the praises of some virtue, or the beauties of some place mentioned in it” and examines its ethics and aesthetics, in order “to decide their relevance or irrelevance, and give them their relation to the play.” And we could ask the hypocrit to digress from the narrative, as the aria singer does, to invite the pets, the gospel mass choir, the recitative, the dolphins and circadae who comment on us and make a place (chorus also invoking an enclosed place, χορτος, a feeding place, a farmyard in which cattle were kept) between speech, song, premise, conclusion, thought, and law.

This recursive chorus would not be performing a meta-function of poetry, as poetry is always in “the play as a whole.” A whole? Where is the inside or outside of the play? Why do we even need to call this writing that enlists the wounded, double-faced, doubt-filled and faceless, something other than poetry? I think that is because we cannot ignore or pretend that we do not still live under the Pythagorean. And in the territory of address of the upper class, male only citizens, playwrights, actors and members of the chorus.

DUALISM: Under the good the Pythagoreans ranged light, unity, understanding, rest, the straight, male, right, definite, even, and square; and under evil as contraries, darkness, plurality, opinion, movement, the curved, female, left, indefinite, odd, irregular.

Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean feminine. I go in disguise. Signification, Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, visionary energy lost.
                                        — Susan Howe

The recursive might let us don the disguise of “Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean” — to be a poet hypocrit, and keep “the thread of connection” — “broken lotus root with the fibers still connected” — as inside the wheel of the critical turn we keep researching the curse and walking the desolation high wire. 

Recur
4. To come back or return (into, in or to) one’s thoughts, mind or memory.

Recurer (obs. rare)
One who helps or aids

Recurrence

Throughout his annual and recurring race he never stops but always changes place 

recurring utterance, a form of aphasia marked by the repetition of certain words or phrases

Recurrent

1597 The muscles which are serviceable to the speech or voice, as are the recurrentes, or retrograding muscles.

Recursant
Of an eagle: Having the back towards the spectator
                                        — OED

who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind
with their back to the spectator            as a form of address

I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
                                        — Michel Foucault

Dream in which my charge is to write an essay about silence. And so I attempt. 
“To speak is to do something.” 
Or to not speak is to take care. Later, to “speak up” is to “tend”

 

Want, Guilt, Need, Care — the four gray hags
                                        — Christa Wolf 

To care is the work of the chorus not to express “something outside the action of the play” but to arrest the dialogue without stopping the action in order to reflect or reflect on actions. The noise of the recurrentes or retrograding muscles in a dance, gestures of utterance issuing from no single character — so, speechless in full speech, masked — on behalf of, to care for, the players in the play, the audience as character in the play — the child at play is in the play

Heart affluence in discursive talk from household fountains never dry
                                        — Thomas Hardy, definition of discourse, OED

On the waterways the night house becomes a neutrality, not a contested space of subordinates. It apprehends a different relation to the animate objects in its hold — silently M and I make lists while the children sleep rocking in their bed boats.

The domestic stage, farmyard, feeding place — open air — public: 

Behind the closed door a child moved furniture

Written In Furniture

A message arranged
But the recipients unaware of the legibility of this medium

What is it you have come to tell me?

---

 

When the angel of death passed over the houses of the Israelites marking doors — dispensing the pharaoh’s rule [as discursives of moral good and evil, just, unjust] to some, and sent (and saved) others under the sign of the bloody X that became wandering in the desert [running hither and tither: passing irregularly from one locality to another], exile, on others — my forehead — the forehead of my house, received an X. Sent to the lions, the snakes by the river who secretly romp together disrupting [passing from premises to conclusions; by ‘discourse’ of reason; ‘ratiocinative’] the believed order of the nature of animal behavior, I departed [running about to the right and the left, laying the separate notices together]

Here I dwell 
and wander

Gather round children of circumstance 
while I pass the plate 
Let chance, occasion, contingency, condition, happenstance, the circling stars, the odds, hazard,
mistake, incident, be our debtors 
               take us hostage 
so we have no choice but to pack up and climb out the window 
That is to run away, to write, to run back into the burning house

Glory to the combination lock 
              with its lost numbers 
And the way we look up at story time 
thinking the face of the teacher is the book 
and our circle the story clock

Come diverge perplex tell ask spoken for speak with quotation, juxtaposition, diagnosis as proposition — braid doom dwellers, wanderers and the able unable — which dys is it keeping us doubters, dancers, the aimfully inarticulate, aphasic, estranged, chronically embarrassed, those who cannot leave the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord, weepers, the exhilarated, army of archers — Turn, bend, twist, spin, brush-the-knee-and-strike

 

---

 

Notes

From COMING EVENTS (Collected Writings), Nightboat Books, Callicoon, New York, 2013. 

Thanks to Myung Mi Kim for years of conversation. Thanks also to Nathaniel Tarn, whose writings about the choral contributed to my thinking. 

And thanks to all of those in whose work I first encountered the possibility of something that might be called the recursive: through letter writing (before computers); in the 1987 issue of ACTS journal called “Analytic Lyric”; in the work of Norma Cole; Benjamin Hollander; in Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson; Luce Irigaray; Hélène Cixous; Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body; Barbara Guest’s Rocks on a Platter, Forces of Imagination, Dürer in the Window, and more recently in the work of Eleni Stecopoulos, Christa Wolf, and Gustaf Sobin, and Impasse of the Angels by Stefania Pandolfo. I’m sure there are many more examples unknown to me or forgotten.

Many thanks to George Albon for his invaluable comments on “Outer Event.”

Thanks to Martin Inn, t’ai chi teacher, acupuncturist, friend, for comment on this writing and many years of wisdom, healing, and friendship.

Thanks beyond possible thanks to Steve Dickison for his repeated readings and indispensible responses to this piece.

 

*Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 4. The full quote is:

I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from — and in what disables the foray, for purposes of fiction, into corners of the consciousness held off and away from the reach of the writer’s imagination. My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world. To think about (and wrestle with) the full implications of my situation leads me to consider what happens when other writers work in a highly and historically racialized society. For them, as for me, imagining is not merely looking or looking at; nor is it taking oneself intact into the other. It is, for the purposes of the work, becoming.

**Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1982), 215–216. The full quotes are:

Inclination speaks out: ‘I don’t want to have to enter this risky world of discourse, I want nothing to do with it insofar as it is decisive and final. … All I want is to allow myself to be borne along, within it, and by it, a happy wreck’. Institutions reply: ‘But you have nothing to fear from launching out; we’re here to show you discourse is within the established order of things .… and if it should happen to have a certain power, then it is we, and we alone, who give it that power.’ … In a society such as our own we all know the rules of exclusion. We all know what is prohibited. We know perfectly well that we are not free to say just anything, that we cannot simply speak of anything, when we like or where we like; not just anyone, finally, may speak of just anything.