Commons

New California Poetry

by Myung Mi Kim

Myung Mi Kim's Commons weighs on the most sensitive of scales the minute grains of daily life in both peace and war, registering as very few works of literature have done our common burden of being subject to history. Abstracting colonization, war, immigration, disease, and first-language loss until only sparse phrases remain, Kim takes on the anguish and displacement of those whose lives are embedded in history.

Kim's blank spaces are loaded openings through which readers enter the text and find their way. These silences reveal gaps in memory and articulate experiences that will not translate into language at all. Her words retrieve the past in much the same way the human mind an image sparks another image, a scent, the sound of bombs, or conversation. These silences and pauses give the poems their structure.

Commons' s fragmented lyric pushes the reader to question the construction of the poem. Identity surfaces, sinks back, then rises again. On this shifting ground, Kim creates meaning through juxtaposed fragments. Her verse, with its stops and starts, its austere yet rich images, offers splinters of testimony and objection. It negotiates a constantly changing world, scavenging through scraps of experience, spaces around words, and remnants of emotion for a language that enfolds the enormity of what we cannot express.

Genres: Poetry, Asian American, American, Read For School

122 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Myung Mi Kim was born in Seoul, Korea. She immigrated with her family to the United States at the age of nine and was raised in the Midwest. She earned a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from The Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. Her collection of poems Under Flag (1991) won the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Award of Merit; subsequent collections include The Bounty (1996), DURA (1999), Commons (2002), River Antes (2006), and Penury (2009).

Myung Mi Kim is the subject of the book The Subject of Building Is a Process / Light Is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim (2008). She has taught at San Francisco State University and in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, where she is the James H. McNulty Chair of English.

Reviews

[maia ‼️ · Rating 5 out of 5]

wowie was that crazy. Myung Mi Kim knows how to make word go together. we read this for my english class and it was difficult and so so good. fragments, poems, medical dissections, reports on war and trauma and the state of the world. wow! anyways!

one of my fave bits:
312
woodness and continual waking
"The medicine is that the head be shaved, washed in lukewarm vinegar
the forehead anointed with the juice of lettuce or of poppy
If the woodness lasts three days without sleep, there is no hope of recovery"

[S P · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 ‘Placed on a large flat rock and covered by a series of smaller stones. Edicts of building for private persons. Remaining principalities long ago divided off. Under that place which is called the earth wall. Around which extends a savage, trackless waste, infested with wild beasts.’
5 ‘With shields. For war and fields.’
6 ‘Roots of a tree close to the property line have gone out under the neighbor’s cornfield. Wherever kin of word is. Partnership of words is one of many members.’
7 ‘Speaking and placing the speaking. To speak from the place of the word is to speak forth. Such noise in the ditches — the mills and farms.’
13 ‘To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither center nor boundary’
16 ‘The thing seen is the thing seen together with the whole space’
23 ‘Without interruption the entry log of days’
28 ‘Motion: that which refuses to be annihilated’
32 ‘A rain saturated tree trunk becomes a feeling’
110 ‘These rehearsals, not as description, but as activation - actively investigating how legibility is constructed and maintained, how “English” is made and disseminated. What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecological degradations, shifts and upheavals in identifications of gender and labor? [...] How to practice and make plural the written and spoken - grammars, syntaxes, textures, intonations… Counter the potential totalizing power of language that serves the prevailing systems and demands of coherence. Contemplate the generative power of language that serves the prevailing systems and demands of coherence Enter language as it factors in, layers in, and crosses fields of meaning, elaborating and extending the possibilities for sense making Consider how the polyglot, porous, transcultural presence alerts and alters what is around it’

-

'The central organizing myth of comprehensive knowledge

Bent as light might bend

The openings in the human body

The age that one is

I will be my mother's age also

Color of robin's egg against spring grass'

(from '424', p44)

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fragmentary, abstract, completely compelling and yet ungraspable, this book is so big and complex I hardly know what to say. Language at its most innovative and complicated and necessary. Worth reading again and again.
One aspect:
"Little flower,
What day is it
The light stops at glum
O'clock and f
A rain saturated tree trunk becomes a feeling
The city of one's birth and the people inside it"

[Rob Hendricks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dazzling in the way it tempts and resists closure; stunning in its deployment of mysterious hybridizations of languages, disciplines, registers, typography; heart and eye-opening in its keening lamentation over history's arc of casualties; a difficult spread of remains; a breathtaking performance of indeterminacy with a frank and supportive epilogue of intent. My hat is off.

[sheng · Rating 5 out of 5]

essential!!!!

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

collage / fragment / mosaic / ripped half sheets from the archives / necessitates return / necessitates patience, openness / language, history, craft

- quotes: -

From "Exordium"

"Those which are of foreign origin. Those which are of forgotten sources. Place and body. Time and action. The snow falls. A falling snow. A fallen snow. A red balloon and a blackwinged bird at semblance of crossing in a pittance of sky."

"Mapping needles. Minerals and gems. Furs and lumber. Alterations through the loss or transposition of even a single syllable. The next day is astronomical distance and a gnarled hand pulling up wild onion."

From "Pollen fossil Record"

"Swerves, oddities, facts, miscues, remnants — threnody and meditation — the perpetually incomplete task of tracking what enters into the field of perception (the writing act) — its variegated and grating musics, cadences, and temporalities

Book as specimen
Book as instruction

The book emerges through cycles of erosion and accretion"

"Desire for the encyclopedic // Interrogation of archive"

“This is to be sung”
“This is to be done”

The lyric undertakes the task of deciphering and embodying a “particularizable” prosody of one’s living. And in that process, inside the procedures of work and of work proceeding: node and pressure point, song making and song gesture. Track: descant, sedimentations, tributaries in any several directions. Show stress, show beat, show alterations in pitch and accentuals. Tempo ruptured, emended. A valence of first and further tongues. Elements of the lyric and its mediations. The duration of the now, the now occurring, that manifests a time before.

A line’s shape, vector, and motion interpolates perception and meter

A measure, a page, the book to embody the multivalent, the multidirectional—a cathexis of the living instant to the acuteness of history

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entering Kim's verse of reverie and fragmentation is not easy or even at times comfortable. But do. Her initial poems in this collection are the most abstracted, broken, even incomprehensible. But soon enough, we see what she is about, and the collection as a whole, the Commons, becomes a terrifying package of traumatic memory, of identity torn apart, of horror that we hope to un-imagine.

The more readers (and speakers) struggle for coherence or clarity, the more the poem resists, tempting us with a more complete meaning, even while--as we see it slowly emerge--we know that is is far better to tuck it back away. This is indeterminacy and ambiguity done right, poems that reveal as much as our consciousness can attend, but never what humanity will truly visit upon itself. The worst of it lives in the white spaces of the page . . .

"Foods cast off from one culture become the fetish foods of another
l b
Speaker: There will be misery in the years of greed. The world will become small and humiliated.
what is folder, are the persimmons
what is shelled, are the chestnut

==

"Bloom already in mark
So that it were a bloom
Steeped in increments
Marks as were scars

===

"deterge to wash off or out, to clear away
s-s-s

shun . nestle
ravenous . seal
ash . gust

===

"Lifts up his burning
A strange now a strange in my clean head"

[EIJANDOLUM]

"Released into our moment, shaped as it is by geographical and cultural displacements,
an exponentially hybrid state of nations, cultures, and voicings

[...]

The poem infiltrates, filters, avulses
:
nuance and gradation
"The fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality."
Aesthetic Theory, Adorno
The contrapuntal, the interruptive, the speculative

[...]


, a word that cannot be translated: it suggests, Ilwhat belongs to the people"

Modes, registers of

Human voice
[collectivity
range
(to) bursting
prayer

Sound's physicality [human longing

Of being in and affecting

Poets as "agents for the most arduous, most dangerous cause there is: to love the other,
even before being loved." Stigmata, Cixous

To usher in
time action matter."

How I love these excerpts... I'd dare to call them the poet's mind chaotic workbook.

[Shane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Commons by Myung mi Kim is a book of poetry held together by white spaces. The tempo is abrupt, and it changes suddenly from page to page, and just as often mid-page. Sections of quotations from medical or official texts sit between stark moments that blend 20th Century Korean (war) history with views on modernist agriculture, society and nature. I am not well read in poetry so I may have missed a lot of the depth of this book, but as an immediate experience it was stark, jarring, and really engaging.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection was certainly beyond my meager poetry knowledge and ability to parse for meaning. I can tell the language is almost playful in spots which highlights the harsh and sometimes brutal scenes the poem is engaged with.

Gun to my head, though, I couldn't tell you what these poems were about!

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

[anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

not common at all. refined and impartial to readers understanding/sentiment. ball buster. her segment on language and the loss it can evokes, i swooned.

[arden · Rating 3 out of 5]

not as good as penury but still pretty good, the second half is much more effective than the first... i think variety was preferred over quality at times

[Dylan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the worst thing I have ever read.

[Taylor Yingshi]

GOODBYE LITHUM

[Aditya · Rating 1 out of 5]

Bottom 10

[Jen Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous and unwavering in its delivery, “Commons” is such a delight to read. Highly recommend!

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The question is labor
Skin loosening from bone is age"

I'm pretty sure I didn't understand any of this book.

[~~ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Commons should be done slowly, attentively. It’s a book that will break your heart, but it’s a book that reminds you it is not your heart that is significant here. Her details are pained, gasping with silence, analogous to the history therein:

“Mapping needles, minerals and gems. Furs and lumber. Alterations through the loss or
transposition of even a single syllable. The next day is astronomical distance and a gnarled
hand pulling up wild onion.”

+

“Translucence of cut pears on glass plates

The robin's breast remained inert. Its eyes shone for four hours,
but near three o'clock, a fly could be seen rubbing its legs over
the now weeping eye.”

As Kim writes: ”The book emerges through cycles of erosion and accretion…”

Here is a book that is a poignant whisper. It may grow to a dry wind, thudding against the broken shutters of shelter. Mostly, a poignant whisper. A document, a fragment, a wound.

[Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
I've said this before, but I don't know how to review poetry. For me, it is far harder to parse than fiction. Is this a brilliant, original, and utterly thought-provoking collection of poems? Yes. Did I understand all of it? Probably not. Did I loooove it? Well, I don't know. There's so much to say about her fragments, about her use of white space, about her unique citationality, about the subjects she writes about (ecological destruction, colonization, language, war, displacement, linear time) and the ways she writes about them. I'm not sure if this is the kind of avant-garde poetry I love. Make no mistake, this is difficult. This is avant-garde -- and I'm all for the avant-garde. But when I compare this to another feminist avant-garde poet, Morgan Parker, her poems are both more accessible & more emotionally resonant & impactful. That's not to say I didn't enjoy this collection, because I did, and I suspect I'll come back to it trying to parse out more and more of its meaning. And again, Kim is brilliant and I gotta support my Korean writers!

[Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have you ever seen the tongue inside a parrot's beak?
A voice that repeats whatever someone trains it.
That yearns to say, just once, a word not in that voice
Have you ever seen that pink, narrow, small tongue?
-Myung­‐Soo Kim, "The Parrot's Tongue"

Much of literature is contained with puzzles. The religious symbolism of Blake, the semantic complexity of Joyce, the word play of Terayama, all of which require solutions. These are small ways of unraveling and discovering artistic truth. Every now and again the next English major graduate from Cambridge 'solves' (emphasis on the quotation marks) the meaning behind Elliot's Wasteland. As over the years more people delve into the poem and what they accomplish is re-discovering the artistic truth. It is that pull that links us with art, poetry, music, that seemly never halts bringing us deeper.

Unlike much literature, some work is puzzling. We are not sure how to solve the puzzle because we are not entirely sure if there even is a puzzle to be solved. The work could be described as inane, a joke, simple depth with a supposedly complex facade. However that is not the case because Commons is none of those descriptors. In fact Commons visibly attacks the categorization of living things, it defies the boundaries of language. It abstracts language from multiple and theoretically endless perspectives in language and structure. For that reason, Commons is puzzling.

Needless to say there is more in common with the book and the individual character than one can interpret at face-value. Commons and Kim's work in general has less to do about language than it has to do about human character. Likewise Wittgenstein was less concerned about language than he was about other thought. Commons itself is 'untranslatable.' I do not mean that literally. The silences. The pauses. Allusions, sentence structure, short phrases even singular words become paragraphs. It could be similarly compared to a piano with all of its pedals pressed and, the score is written in almost entirely pianissimo possibile and the whole piece is barely audible . Aside from a few fortissimo keys that when they come sound like explosions. Words are fortissimo in Commons, they resonate in silence with vivid imagery of a changing world, description that defies whatever could be described in a few paragraphs. Words that cannot attach themselves to a changing world. I suppose it is to isolate every event to be in stasis, suspended in time and space. It is the stasis of words which can only be passed over silence that can never be translated.

Commons is previously said not solely an attack on language. By deploying multiple perspectives, multiple organizations of language with an incorporation with silence. By attacking multiple points of power. To resist the confusing discourses of human nature: war, immigration, racial-language discrimination, death. When someone is on their last breath to describe an event that we say made them "speechless." They cannot form a coherent sentence. They only speak in short bursts. Phrases are quick. Short. Trying to describe as much about what happened, everything that happened, in a single phrase in a short period of time. One word becomes twenty. A sentence a million. Unlike being caught in a heated moment of confusion. As a listener you do not have the time to digest and comprehend everything that was said to you. Commons is the heated "loss of words" described above however unlike the example, the sparseness of words allows the reader to reflect each event in isolation. It can not be described. This 'untranslatable' characteristic of the work breaks the signifying chain of language. There is left only the real. It is beautiful. In the absence of language the real has regained its reality. The real can be destructive, brutish, terrible, diseased, I find it depressing but the real is beautiful. To understand silence in the contemporary noisy world is beautiful.

[Phuong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite countless readings, I still have very little idea about what is going on in Myung Mi Kim’s collection of poems, Commons. Surprisingly, I am fine with this. Even more surprisingly, it is one of the main reasons why I keep coming back to re-read the collection. And each time that I come back to re-read Kim’s poems, something new reveals itself to me. The first time, I was mostly hung up on trying to understand the narrative thread through her poems, and trying to link that back to the course. After all, there must have been a reason why this was an assigned reading in an Asian American literature course. Certainly, there are themes of war, places and bodies, and language throughout the poems, which we have encountered in the other selections from the course. There is also a strong feminist tone underlying some of the poems, especially in the section entitled “Lamenta,” in which there are almost performance-like pieces – as witnessed by the imperatives for “vocalise” and “mask play” - laced between the other poems, dealing with the idea of woman as a suffering body – or perhaps not even body, but animal (24).

These themes are made especially transparent in the final section of the collection, entitled “Pollen Fossil Record,” in which Kim essentially lays out the themes of the book and her goals, albeit in a highly poetic manner. It surprised me very much to reach the end of the collection to find this “poem” here. My first inclination was to think that Kim had pulled a trick on everyone, and that the collection was supposed to be misunderstood, and that was why she was including this almost-explanatory section at the end. However, I happened to come upon an audio clip of Kim doing a reading of some selections from Commons, in which she explains that she was essentially coerced into including this last section by her editors, and that it was the result of a “negotiation” between them. That made perfect sense to me because I couldn’t understand why she, as an artist, would feel the need to explain her work so blatantly. I’m sure that I am not the only one who found the collection hard to grasp, and so the inclination from the point of view of the publishers may be to make the book more appealing by including this section. It had the reverse effect on me – although Kim does do a good job at providing interesting insight in “Pollen Fossil Record,” especially when in her discussion of language and the question of “What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecological degradations, shifts and upheavals in identifications of gender and labor? […] What are the implications of writing at this moment, in precisely this “America”? […] Counter the potential totalizing power of language that serves the prevailing systems and demands of coherence” (110).

The audio clip that I found not only clarified the “Pollen Fossil Record” section for me, but it also provided me with a different approach to reading the poetry collection. I was struck by her reading of the poems, not only because of the fact that she has a very distinctive speaking style (and a slight accent), but because only through hearing her read the poems did I get a sense of the importance of the sounds of the words. This allowed me to better understand why she chose to have these seemingly nonsensical passages: “Salt rot/Bramble flesh/ Litter husk/Blink ditch/Hunt stick/Hunger welt/Trow Song” (51). I was also surprised by how willingly she was to mix lines or omit them entirely – her reading of “Pollen Fossil Record” consisted of her picking and choosing which lines she wanted to read, as opposed to reading the whole piece straight, which may attest to the fact that perhaps she is more concerned with sounds and phrases themselves versus the narrative of her poetry.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Myung Mi Kim is one of the few poets I've run across who reads with as much precision as she writes. And as much as this collection is about that unsettled, struggling place between languages, listening to it read seems crucial:

http://mars.gmu.edu:8080/dspace/handl...

Man, the valence of her voice--it trembles with authority.

Ex:

jiph-jiph-jiph

Swallow Swallow Bird






This is the gullet




Helmets make cooking pots

Tin cans make roofs


[sparrow, crow]





Not much left
Not much left


At it's worst avant poetry can be too chummy with theory--and anything that speaks of relations, structures and the beholding eye using a lot of white space and a decentered voice can be passed off as a poem. What I think Myung Mi Kim does so well is to return to suffering as the real product of asymmetrical power and to incorporate this suffering into the content and forms of her poems--their sudden shifts, the erosion the white space presents, syllables--fragments of words--suddenly emerging in the text. The end result are some carefully tuned, sonically brilliant long poems.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Commons is enormously challenging, but a masterwork of subtext and silence. A superbly successful collection of poetry, and one that's incredibly relevant to current refugee displacement – Kim deftly explores the diaspora and othering that are inextricably linked to the refugee identity. Recommended reading for anyone with a soul, though if you're not up for a challenge you're going to have a hard time with this. (Protip: read it out loud.)

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a surprising little collection that holds so much weight in its white spaces.

I didn't much like it at first but it expanded while I read into this enormous thing. This endless voice of simple things juxtaposed with the fallout of war. It's very image driven with very little sense of trying to communicate the way we normally do. Sentences aren't common in the collection, but it doesn't feel overly sparse either.

It's confounding and maybe brilliant.

[ryo narasaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

i have to admit i didnt get it. but after hearing Myung Mi talk about it and read directly from it, i want to read and listen more. it really got to me at the public reading in the kaleidescope room at UVA.

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

myung mi kim is every day important. i feel desperate in my assertions. because she is so far beyond any noise i could make or could comprehend making. she is a tender knowledge of the being that tries. that tries from its position. do not overlook her. or rather do.

[Spencer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like language poetry? You'll like this.

[Andy Stallings · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal, the opposite of the Spahr book I read right before. A book to look deeper and deeper into. The politic poetics I've been looking for, in that it's poetry.

[April Peletta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visually stunning with content to match.