Tag: Myung Mi Kim

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I now write for Jacket2

Today is March 9th and all the clocks have been set one hour ahead. The day feels a bit different to me starting in this way. The rules tell me it is one hour, but my body and habits continue to believe in another. It will simply take a little time before the new type of day feels right to me again.

I’m sharing this because I am now blogging over at Jacket2 for their Commentaries section. My Commentaries series is called TIME TEXT BODY NOISE, and I’ll be writing about how we experience and imagine time when we read, hear, and see poetry happen. Though this is unstated on the site, I will predominantly conduct this exploration through Asian American poetics, though a few other poets will be in the mix, too. I’m tired of Asian American work being seen predominantly for its Asian Americanness.

I’ll be pointing to work by folks like Tan Lin, Myung Mi Kim, Janice Lee, Jose Garcia Villa, Divya Victor, and Hoa Nguyen.

Central questions about dailiness, the body’s experience of time, different modes of reading, listening practices, and the page as a field of time will be considered.

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“Conceptual” poetry

I had an incredibly exhausting trip out to Buffalo with some friends to participate in the small press book fair there. What an incredible space.

A lot of my friends out there fall into the “conceptual poet” category. This label fascinates me for who gets placed in it versus who does not. There seems to be a strong proceduralism and/or repetitiousness to the projects I have seen get read under this “conceptual” banner. And a provocation at the center of their work. Some might describe it as “offensive.” I am on the fence. I’m interested and alert to it because I haven’t quite made up my mind about what I think it’s doing. That in itself is very exciting to me.

But what about authors working in different shapes with different motivations behind their work? Nathaniel Mackey. Urayoan Noel. Myung Mi Kim. There is a sense of history at their center that they write around. Does this disqualify them from this label of “conceptual”? I’m inclined to think so.