Words Matter

Myung Mi Kim: Interview by James Kyung-Jin Lee

5 Myung Mi Kim Interview by J A M E S K Y U N G - J I N L E E Myung Mi Kim was an hour late to an early evening poetry reading in February 1996, one that celebrated the release of The Bounty. She was held up in the infamous Los Angeles rush-hour traffic. When she finally arrived, a few in the audience had gone home, but a good twenty or so remained— some avid readers of Kim from the beginning of her published career, others listening to her poetry for the first time. Kim read from both The Bounty and her forthcoming book, DURA; it was a performance that was guided by the reign of silence, punctuated by the sharpness of words. Silence acted as a filter, distilling her thematic concerns to a single utterance , so that the force of Kim’s poetic voice could be evinced but never fully known. Kim’s poetry continually strives to move beyond scripted ideas of language, identity, history, and narrative. She and her poetry both want to, and do, resist attempts by others to delimit what are ultimately for her spurious labels. Whether she is being referred to as a Korean American poet, a woman poet, a Bay Area poet, or a postlanguage poet, Kim wants to reject all labels. Yet, at the same time, just as she is aware that getting somewhere necessitates being bounded by available paths—or freeways—she is also acutely aware that her poetry is girded and delineated by political scripts, narratives of history . This tension between the flights of her poetic imagination and the structure of narrative traffic makes Kim’s poetry dynamic, not only for where it goes, but also for how it gets there. Kim came to Los Angeles partly for a small California book tour promoting The Bounty, partly to finalize plans for the release of DURA, and partly to visit her mother. During the 1995–1996 academic year, Oberlin College (her alma mater) stole her away from San Francisco State University, where she is a professor of creative writing, to be an artist in residence. Her poems have benefited from what she calls the anthologizing phenomenon, including both Asian American (The Forbidden Stitch, Premonitions) and “avant-garde” American (Primary Trouble) collections. We met to talk a day after the poetry reading, in between her morning interview with a local Korean newspaper and a meeting with the Sun and Moon Press folks. Our conversation represented a short stopover, assessing where her work was at that point, where it was moving , but our talk was also a pause to remind ourselves that where we are is always the beginning and end point of our searches. J K L I remember when you read from Under Flag. What kind of differences have you been trying to think about, postUnder Flag? M M K I think what I am trying to teach myself in recent work is ways of extending and furthering the investigations I began in Under Flag: what is the subject’s relationship to narrativity, to the demands and nuances of “telling,” and, perhaps more significantly, to rendering experience. I’m tracking what 93 Myung Mi Kim appear to be distortions in time (or linearity, or chronology) and ways to suggest that these may be closer to the way perception actually takes place. “Post-Under Flag,” as you put it, I feel I’m exploring the interplay between prosody (sound value, rhythms, cadences) and “time”—perception. I’m attempting to listen for the “speed,” “duration,” and “music” of perception taking place. J K L How did it feel to get to the kind of moments where what one might call extraneous narratives fall away? How did it feel to write in that way? M M K It’s a lesson in staying as close as possible to that first move or push toward language. How does it feel to write this way? I would say it’s as if I am listening—at (or in) an act of attention. J K L How does this relate to your interrogation of English? M M K Perhaps it’s in (or through) this state of attention that the possibilities for “interrogation” exist at all. I am aware of trying to address/hear/notate in an English that is inflected by a Korean. I am aware...