Radio Days

Ha Jaeyoun’s Radio Days begins with a nonevent, an unremarkable exchange—followed by the realization that even everyday pleasantries sound overplayed:

You say goodbye,
I say hello.
It reminds me of The Beatles.
How long have I known this music?

First published in Korea in 2006, Radio Days is Ha’s belated travelogue to a world already exhaustively mapped by a globalized monoculture. It’s a world overwhelmingly scaled yet reducible to memes: “Clouds and stairs and windows go round and round like Superman.” Time blurs with hyperactivity, as in the ingenious poem “Simultaneously,” in which nearly every line ends with “and”:

In that moment she turned the page and
the man in the car with the doors open ran it off the cliff and
the cat nudged the coffee cup on the table and
the carpet fluttered a little and
the clock’s broken second hand revolved twelve times and

Who- or whatever’s speaking in the prose poem “Old Bed” isn’t just old, it’s prehistoric: “Hanging on my sides there might be fig seeds somebody spat out millions of years ago, fine strands of dust cover me like a hand-woven blanket.”

In her translator’s introduction, Sue Hyon Bae dwells on one difficulty of translation from Korean, in which pronouns are less pervasive and often gender-neutral: “many Korean poems have a certain neutrality that is not possible with grammatically correct English.” That general difficulty proves uniquely challenging with Ha’s work, which gravitates toward neutral tones and settings. Her cityscapes—nocturnal, chilly, all but motionless—often feel deserted, devoid of anyone but Ha’s vigilant speakers:

Fluttering up the clock tower, a dove,
the air
briefly wavers

Bench, park, night, nothing matters

But Ha rarely lets neutrality prevail; she upsets the poems’ equilibria, teetering into provocation, digression, unadulterated nostalgia. “Midsummer Snowball,” one of several endearing childhood poems, hinges on epiphany:

With me, without me,
the summer sky is blue
and ice cream is sweet.

It ends with a one-word bang, characteristic of Ha’s prankish poetics—the titular snowball hitting home:

Like it’s just remembering, the window
shatters.