How I Became a Rat

To describe the negatively-charged galactic glamor of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, pulsating in Don Mee Choi's fiberoptic (English) robe, is a difficult task for those raised in the anhedonic supermarket aisles of US poetry. This is because Kim Hyesoon's work mobilizes a cosmology of icons that Western, and most other, literary cultures reject: garbage, cooking odors, hair, holes, pigs, rats. Such anti-icons—associated with the feminine, the domestic, animals, and illness—rise as rich, ambivalent phenomena in her night sky: subliminal, profuse, in motion, blacked out.

Consider one such emblem: the pregnant “mommy” rat that adorns the cover of Kim Hyesoon and Choi's first standalone collaboration, the chapbook When the Plug Gets Unplugged (2006), from Susan Schultz's real-deal TinFish Press. Here is a femme whose gynoprofusion is both her vulnerability and her threat, whose very image calls for her extermination. A diction within an interdiction. An oscillating paradox. She propagates a cosmic wind. She cultivates a nursery of stars, of black holes. She is the dynamo of poetry.

And what did that mommy rat give birth to? To her own mommy-ness, poems of "mommy," poems of "rat," "in mommy's house the walls are also mommy"—a diction within an interdiction. An abundance of life in death. It looks like mommy is expecting another litter!

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As Choi has noted, Kim Hyesoon's 1979 debut came the same year that a military coup put General Chun Doo Hwan in power. The young Kim Hyesoon worked as an editor, a job that required her to take manuscripts from the publishing house to the military police to be censored. One manuscript she delivered was returned entirely blacked out except for the title and the playwright's name. As Choi proposes, "It is from this blackened space that, I believe, Kim Hyesoon's poetry emerges."

A diction inside an interdiction. A paradoxical expansion inside the constriction of the patriarch, the army-man, the violent state censor. Anyone who has read or shared Kim Hyesoon's work feels the charge of this emergence, carried through that cosmic zone of black wind, black hair.

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I first read Kim Hyesoon's poetry, as translated by Choi, in Circumference Magazine around the time of the TinFish Press release. I was addicted from the first hit. I scoured listservs and message boards for this mysterious Choi: where could I get more poems? Eventually, Schultz caught my bleat and connected me to her. And I demanded an entire manuscript. At first, Choi somewhat demurred; this would be a big job, her work was meticulous, it could not just happen overnight! But then she found that inimitable celestial gear of hers and, consulting closely with Kim Hyesoon, created the selection published with Action Books as Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (2008), its effervescing title evoking its slippery plenitude.

We at Action Books went on to publish five more collections by Kim Hyesoon, as well as the work of contemporary Korean women poets such as the solitary, visionary Choi Seungja and the spiky, fissile Kim Yideum. The translators who worked on these books include Choi, Jiwon Chin, Lauren Albin, Sue Hyon Bae, Won-Chung Kim, Cathy Park Hong, Souen Seo, Hedgie Choi, Ji yoon Lee, Johannes Göransson, and Jake Levine. The books were designed first by Eli Queen and then by Andrew Shuta, many featuring the devoutly rambunctious art of Kim Hyesoon's artist-daughter, Fi Jae Lee. New Directions, in picking up Kim Hyesoon's recent volume, Autobiography of Death (2018), and her newest, Phantom Pain Wings (2023), further amplifies the work of these sister presses.

The promulgation of Kim Hyesoon's poetry in English was thus the work of many hands, a swarmy, busy galaxy, belted with exoplanets, tangled with comets, orbited by stars and their anagrams, the rats.

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I offer this plural history of artists, translators, designers, and presses because I refuse to provide another individually wrapped American “success” story of the lone artist's rise and rise. Yes, one might call Kim Hyesoon a “genius” or a “master poet,” and in nearly 20 years of describing her for various grant applications and press releases and introducing her at events, I have occasionally reached for these terms, with their bitter aftertaste of exclusion and exploitation. This only highlights the paucity of English as a literary language: it has no good words to describe art's breadth; its svelte, erratic power; its sacrifices and prophecies; its subterranean resources and routes. English speakers want to seal art into the narrowest packet they can find and put it on a shelf.

But Kim Hyesoon's art is bigger. As big as a mommy rat. It's pregnant. It moves. It has black hair. It vomits as it gives birth. It killed mommy, it is mommy, and it's never just one. It's a pile of dead pigs gone clack-clacking into the air.

Describing Kim Hyesoon and artists like her requires expanding our notions of art. Readers need to eat their way through the dictionaries, then rise as one, with bigger vocabularies. They need to spread their rat wings until the whole collective silhouette is as big as the night sky and starts to bend and distend as something larger begins to sing at a lower frequency, as something smaller begins to beat at a higher rate, as something births its constellation, a clicking, glittering litter.

That's us, who see with shut eyes.

Who open our eyes in the dark.