BY SHAW WORTH
Art by Federica Pescini
Geology has produced one of the richer specialist vocabularies in English (‘geopetal’, ‘pillow lava’, ‘gryke’), one sadly sparingly touched in a post-lapidary age. One of its most precious stones is ‘thunderegg,’ a rock formed from volcanic ash with a mineral deposit in its interior (in cross-section one is reminded of a Cadbury’s crème egg). Their insides make them fragile; thrown at a tree, a thunderegg will split into its colours. Though she now lives in Chicago, Meg Kim is from Oregon, where they are abundant, and
When you return
the day splits like a thunderegg
with a miniature borealis inside. (‘In The Valley’)
Kim’s debut chapbook Invisible Cartographies, published September 2024 by New Delta Review, is perhaps a collection of thundereggs. She cores into the rock underneath her like an apple, pulling up a cross-section of events, and throws them into mutual play. Composed of 21 poems in two untitled sections, the book shuttles freely between generations, continents, times and forms, arcing from ‘ancestors’ to Kim’s immediate family, from Korea to the US.
That may sound superficially familiar, nor is it a help that the material of diaspora and identity has produced some of the more exhausting discourse around contemporary poetry in recent years. This book is unashamedly a personal history articulated in political terms; it is ‘about’ a single diaspora, narrowed through and then broadening out from a single family, but its purchase is much wider than any potted comment on genre or form. What Stuart Hall called ‘home-thoughts from abroad’ are this book’s bread and butter, constructions and imaginings of identity and nationhood rather than fixed taxonomies.
Just so, rather than marshalling her heterogeneous material, Kim’s voice never settles on an organising principle, in its own description ‘is verb, happening’ (‘Poem As Wider Than And Including You and Me’). In that approach lies the book’s success. There is no map of the earth we have not read before. But Kim is willing to cut these maps up and reorient them, to see where the ‘ghost flames’ are burning, even if she might get burned in the process. ‘I learned this yesterday from a book. / Cardinal direction is of no relevance here’ (‘Have You Seen The Ghost Flames At Nogeun-Ri?’).
What results is a book that never stops moving. Kim’s sources are many, and her formal ambition and range huge for a work of this length. That is both energising and terrifying to read;
she is risky, dexterous, even flighty. Never, however, does her rhetorical bravura outpace what she is trying to write; on the contrary, Kim jumps between traditions, languages and times to give them their own way of speaking. Her aptitude for poetry’s possibilities is demanding as it is generous.
The book thereby immediately and explicitly recalls a distinguished vein of Korean American poetic experiment from Suji Kwock Kim to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose magisterial 1982 hybrid work Dictée forms one of the book’s epigraphs. To read Dictée’s 178 pages is to learn the dance of its elaborate formal structure and metahistorical mode; at just 39 pages, Invisible Cartographies does not give itself room to surface for air nor leave a paratextual trace of what it’s doing. The effect is heady, even dizzying at times. Kim rarely settles on a single image for more than a clause; her similes multiply from line to line, while lashing enjambs provoke hammering internal chain-rhymes, as in ‘Ars Poetica For A Non-Native Speaker’: ‘He stayed a year in Koreatown, / with one other Korean physician. Neither / bought groceries there, neither dreamed’. Dizzied though readers might be, they will never get nauseous. These ideas are not being thrown against the wall. Rather, we feel Kim’s willingness to let the cadences of her sources (whether overheard in Koreatown or pulled from an archive) buffet her language. In so doing, she opens an infinitude of ways of knowing them.
Her experiments with form follow in a similar strand. The range of lyric forms in the chapbook stretch on like an MFA-scented salmagundi (ekphrasis, haibun with inset pseudo-haiku, ars poetica, prose poetry, possibly an accentual metrical scheme with medial caesurae, whiffs of the sonnet, among others). But where the instinct in a writing workshop might be to ask if the poem ‘needs’ to whip around so fast (or, worse, what the poem ‘wants’), formal mutability marks these poems as belonging to a single unit. Although ostensibly not a single long work, or even a sustained sequence, Invisible Cartographies reads like one; Kim’s dismemberments and blurrings of her material are, in fact, where she practices her greatest formal rigour.
Negotiating the two is where the book is excellent. Kim allows each of her ideas and subjects to solicit individuated written responses,. In the hands of a less attentive writer, the book would risk, at the least, formal overwhelm, and more seriously an obnoxious technical bravura. But instead it displays a profound attunement to the material at hand, unafraid to reflect the ambiguities and issues it encounters. It is difficult, indeed, to write about this book without reaching for specialised, technical language, and more difficult yet to find that any description still comes up short. And there is her art. Kim knows that there is something beautiful in that conundrum; that defamiliarising us from whatever apparent ‘skills’ of decipherment or close reading we may bring to reading poetry can counterintuitively unfold a new dimension of the art form itself.
Perhaps the most salient example is ‘Nogeun-Ri,’ briefly quoted above, and in many ways the collection’s centrepiece. The poem is a five-page meditation on the American gun massacre of South Korean wartime refugees in the eponymous underpass in the summer of 1950 (the US last conducted a now-discredited investigation under the Clinton administration, who refused to formally apologise; the South Korean government has repeatedly reproached them and memorialised it). Seven sections search for and never settle on a form; wheeling through speakers, registers, and tones, as a body they become the inarticulacy, and inarticulability, of the violence considered. But as Kim splices records of American military communications just before the killing with counterfactuals of conversations with her grandmother (‘fled her home / has not said / refugee’), the thesis underlying the whole work emerges: ‘Every memory, a translation.’ Though the poem is, by her own admission, ‘viscous and impossible to walk through,’ it is only impossible while it is linear. She lets the records write each other.
‘Nogeun-Ri’ is monumental in scale, but the same technique radiates out through her smaller forays. On quite another note, ‘The Second Generation Revisits The Question Of The Good Life’ sees Kim ironise her formal freedom as an expression of malcontent, indents sprawling across the page like bored flicks of the wrist:
Some actions lack
the luxury of sprawl.
Indeed, where the collection is less successful is when it suffers from what appears to be too much formal constraint. ‘My Name Means “Pearl”’ has all the conceptual elements of the book at large (haenyeo divers at Jeju), but when Kim puts her thumb on her ostensible project (‘I […] will build / something iridescent from my wounds’) something that should have escaped becomes trapped. As she says better elsewhere, ‘Really, you / came with an unnameable desire’ (‘Decontextualised’).
When it does reckon with the unnameable, when the thunderegg or pearl breaks open, the book is iridescent. The title of ‘Decontextualised’ provokes the questions that haunts Kim’s written inquiry into her own identity: can it be known, or packaged into a single line? Can recovering a context make it hers — and is that valuable? When she is a stranger to her own experience, a sparse, oblique poetry of unrelenting beauty emerges. Percolating 60s deep-image practice through a first-person that never states itself, ‘In The Valley’ is an exquisite tissue of observation, doing as much with nothing as something:
Absence like a tarp stretched wide, keeping
water from inside.
The place where the snow was,
gaping.
Geolocalised settings (Promontory Point in Chicago, the I-5 highway, L.A.’s Koreatown, the Nogeun-Ri underpass) become mysteries again, while mysteries simultaneously sharpen their profiles. The book has a geological consciousness. Kim’s proclivity for tiny standalone lines appear to fill themselves with ghostly footnotes (a gwisin, a folkloric ghost, even receives a dramatic monologue). As the chapbook moves towards its end, Kim’s mind becomes its own problematic presence, as in ‘Object Study, Before The Condo Is Sold,’ one of the better elegies I’ve read in recent years. Here three items (a rosary, a camera, a jar of garlic cloves) are ‘twice reborn, twice abstracted’ as she revisits them, dispossessed of the memories animating them; ‘study’ is a luminous pun between the reference photos her grandfather took for his paintings and, presumably, the room she is standing in. In the transliteration of jjigae alone, as the Roman alphabet struggles to represent Korean double consonants, the tittles crowding the word make alterity speak between life and death, Korean and English: you were here, and now you are not. This is no commemorative ode. Kim has chosen to tell the truth about the beauty of grief, its forgetting.
All that is a lot for 39 pages. Like the conceptual weight of its title, Invisible Cartographies does not pull punches. It is not an easy read. That difficulty is what makes the book good. I am reminded of two aphorisms from Charles Bernstein’s superb collection of essays Attack of the Difficult Poems: (a) that difficult poems are normal, and (b) difficult poems are ‘like this’ because of their innate makeup. Kim is exceptional among poets not for exploring any single aspect of her family and its history, but rather for her approach to doing so. The book is alive to the ease and concomitant untrustworthiness of both sentiment and detachment: both have their places and times, but what matters more is an openness to the subject at hand. The sensitivity of her own curatorial hand is in full attestation (little surprise that she has extensive editorial experience). Ten years ago, Harry Josephine Giles wrote on their blog in praise of both care over shock and shock as a potential form of care, which strikes me as an apt description of this chapbook’s internal engine. It shocks with each turn of form; it cares, however, in delivering the incredibly ambitious project it sets itself.
Faced with the prospect of writing criticism of poetry of this kind (by which I mean both ‘diaspora poetry’ and experimental work at large), I find the language available — and discourse that has surrounded it — coming up short. Invisible Cartographies, in its infinite ideas, is perhaps best described as one of the more difficult beasts in contemporary poetry, namely the ‘hybrid.’
Critics too often charge hybridity meaninglessly with pretentiousness; its defenders, on the other hands, frequently resort to a pack of impenetrable metaphors, of which I am guilty. Shouldn’t it be a cause for celebration, however, that language doesn’t suit? Work like Kim’s does make a demand: it requires readers to think with it in its own earned, self-wrought, in-between terms. Nor should it be any surprise that a phenomenon as complex as diaspora might invite that kind of reflection. Critical unwillingness to engage with that complexity, moreover, should be regarded with heavy suspicion.
In moving so quickly from idea to idea, Kim leaves no room for what Bernstein calls ‘the blame game.’ We could all stand to escape from it. Invisible Cartographies is, moreover, a hopeful collection of poems. Yes, it is often ambiguous, and volatile, and challenging; this is because of the precision with which she has examined the situation that has come down to her. She has entrusted us with her own observations. She picked up a rock on the ground and cracked it open to find something much more beautiful inside. For that she should be, and will be, applauded.
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