On Ginger Ko's 'Ghosts, Models, Visions' (2017)

Cover of Ginger Ko’s ‘Ghosts, Models, Visions’

The speakers in Ginger Ko’s chapbook Ghosts, Models, Visions contemplate the peculiarities of living in the present and a near-future populated by post-human automatons, strangely evolved mammals, and the unborn. All of these entities have a voice in this collection, along with seemingly regular human beings, and all are subject to the numbing effects of late capitalism, enacting labor that divorces the mind from the body and the self from its selves, and straining under unyielding debt in spite of constant effort, as in this excerpt from “They Have Stopped Moving”:

They have gathered
the information
of the world
and they cannot
predict continuance
from the data. Will
my representative
build other
representatives
of color? Will
my automaton
return the world
to itself? How
do I decide
whether it is
important that I
run my fingernail
down my thigh,
to watch the little
trail of white
before my brownness
fills back in? I
am grateful
to be born
so far along.
I am buying
myself a future,
a material outlook.

As in this poem, the speakers tend to espouse a matter-of-fact, deadpan tone, while asking profound and odd questions about their circumstances in a pre- or post-Singularity world. Here, a human speaker seems to consider whether their mechanical analog will restore the world after the human beings have annihilated themselves, and expresses a desire for continuance in spite of dire predictions. Rather than embracing the fantasy of a postracial future, Ko envisions race, gender, and human cruelty as persistent societal shapers, even as our bodies morph and dissolve in the acid baths of mental work and technological upheaval. In “The Rotted Water of My Urbanity,” the speaker dryly observes:

When
your own body
is meaningless, when
you sit at home
on soft furniture
because your
automaton sits
at work every hour
of the day, suddenly
you begin to love
all the bodies.

The automaton may be a metaphor for dissociation of body from mind that occurs when one is engaged in too much white-collar work, or it may the type of person who enacts labor in the present and in the not-so-distant future. In any case, neither human beings, nor automatons, nor ghosts, nor post-humans fare very well in this dystopian world spiked with images of industrial feed lots and the telegraphic utterances of the unborn, although intriguingly again, all retain the ability to speak and think, keenly bearing witness to the dynamics of their world and ours, as in these lines from “We Can Only Shine Where There Is Light”:

All of us
who survived
by letting others
tell, providing inquiry
for others’ pleasure
in providing answers,
we lasted the longest,
pressing buttons,
typing input.

February 7, 2019

< previous post next post >

Tweens: Asian American Poetry & Poetics in the 2010s From now through the end of March, I will be writing short commentaries on live events and recent poetry collections by Asian Pacific Islander American poets. I’m focusing on this period, as we begin a new year toward the end of a decade full of upheaval and rife with the feeling of imminent doom, which happens to have been a particularly rich era for publication by APIA poets with a widening of aesthetic approaches and styles, ethnic diversification beyond the first waves of APIA writing, and a burgeoning of voices young and established.

A few of my commentaries will feature interviews with the directors and editors of some of the Asian American literary venues and organizations that have abetted this boon. Some commentaries will also feature visual art by APIA artists, beginning with this banner image of Generations: 500 hundred human years in dogs/trade by the Seattle-based artist Saya Moriyasu (many thanks to the G. Gibson Gallery). My goal is not to provide a comprehensive survey, which is of course impossible, but to briefly investigate some of the currents in this literary sound.

I’ve invoked the word tweens partly because I like the youthful connotations of the word, which seem to aptly evoke this energetic resurgence, and partly to unsettle the old positing of Asian Americans as living “between two worlds,” which always struck me as off the mark, while sincerely trying to get at some real feeling of unbelonging. Tweens also references this young decade of the twenty-first century (between ten and twenty) as well as my interest in hybrid forms that blend poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, that speak to history and personal experience. Many of the works that I’ll examine here will do that. Thank you for visiting, viewing, and reading, and a felicitous 2019 to you and yours.

Anna Maria Hong’s first poetry collection, Age of Glass, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America's 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award. Her novella, H & G, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize and was published by Sidebrow Books in May 2018. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in early 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry, fiction, and essay in The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry,and many other places. She is the editor of Growing Up Asian American, an anthology of fiction and memoir. She joined the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018 and is a board member of the Belladonna* Collaborative.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.

The International Examiner