The People’s Field
by Haesong Kwon
(Southeast Missouri State University Press, October 2019)
Reviewed by Nathan Knapp
There is something of Paul Celan in The People’s Field, the debut poetry collection from Haesong Kwon, a wound inherent to the poetry which the poetry itself serves to both obscure and illuminate. I kept thinking of Celan as I read these poems, a few of which I first heard Kwon read aloud five or six years ago when we were both living in a windy, heat-drenched, and shoddy town on the plains of northern Oklahoma. Every word in Kwon’s work, as in Celan’s, stands in for a vast and abyssal longing for home, aching with a kind of self-negating fullness—or a self-filling emptiness—corresponding with a dizzying array of flavors and aromas: mudfish, dried fish, monkfish, shrimp crackers, field onions (“Some let you rot / for gravid fish”). My experience of Kwon (in-person as opposed to in-poem) is likewise one I associate with aromas and tastes. In the time we were living across the block from each other he often held long dinners at his second-story apartment full of smoke, flavor, talk, broth. Both ashtrays and bellies grew full.
He may not wish for me to say these things in a review of his book. In person, as on the page, Haesong Kwon inhabits an immense, even fierce privacy, and it is in part this privacy that connects him to Celan, the poet who in Michael Hamburger’s translation writes:
Circular graves, below. In
four-beat time the year’s pace on
the steep steps around them
and
Hours, May-coloured, cool.
The no more to be named, hot,
audible in the mouth.
No one’s voice, again.
“Asiana,” the poem that opens The People’s Field, reads in full:
The clouds
are vanishing.
They are always going.
This, the page,
is my baby
she did not say
but in the sky
she is quivering.
She is not small.
She does not say
I had thought
one thing.
Negation follows negation. Even what is affirmed, at least from the perspective of the human, negates itself: the clouds are both “vanishing” and “always going.” The only thing that isn’t disappearing is the unnamed she, quivering “in the sky.” All that is, quivers. All that is not is what isn’t said, a kind of apparition, her, lingering in the sky of the poem, with the vanishing clouds and their essence of always going, and whoever she is, and what she could not or did not say, which is what she is saying, or trying to say, now, as the speaker—whom I want to call the poet, since I do not really believe in speakers, only poets in the act of speaking—tries to say his one thing. He tries to say his one thing as all and everything vanishes, is going, always. He isn’t attempting to keep the world being described from vanishing. Because it already has. It’s already gone. This isn’t magical thinking—though there is certainly something incantatory, something prayer-like going on here.
Throughout The People’s Field there is a deepening sense of the poet’s attempt to render his own spirit—a fleshy and material spirit, eating shrimp-flavored crackers, drinking makgeolli—as home. To make himself into home: not to make home into his own image, or some individualistic quest to make home wherever he is, but rather to reconstitute himself, so that he himself will resemble, be, and continue to become that vanished and always vanishing thing that is home.
The past swirls around the poet, and the poet turns round and round, looking at that swirling world. And yet this doesn’t feel like a poetry of memory. It feels like a poetry of reality, a reality that does not admit time into its essence, the reality of a past that has collapsed or even crushed—or is always crushing—the time that is now. This is what ties Kwon to Celan: it’s as if the present cannot be at all, because of the past’s immense presence. As Kwon writes in “Small Prints”:
A clement
and unusual
vegetation eleven
years ago. She
rolled inside it.
Face pressed
to a panel of
bus, a shoulder
of Her. Going
alone
Elsewhere, he ends a poem:
Chary of flavors
a hawk in a bower,
I was for yams.
He is reticent, reluctant, in a way, for tastes, a bird of prey, at rest, for yams. What does it mean to be for yams? I don’t know, but it’s a delicious not-knowing, because there is such an abundance of freshness here. Take the entirety of “Pond”:
Like all postmen
you take a vow of celibacy.
Each step a
wet
stone to my winter, the divinity
school
is a pond
in Incheon.
Two sentences, twenty-five words, eight lines, a world, a sackful of messages carried over the shoulder, in the bleak part of the year, stepping on wet stones, both slippery to walk on and for sharpening knives—or winters—and that word divinity left hanging at the end of the line, crashing into a school which is a depth of water in a city just southwest of Seoul. Or, as in “Small Car”:
In a cut, a field of war
you eat.
In a lost stage
of prayer the thing grows back.
Let this be a hand
missing a finger.
The thing grows back in a lost stage of prayer, but the poet still prays, he (a bird of prey) prays for his poem to be a hand missing a finger, something capable of reaching out, of connection. And yet he wants that attempting connecting hand to itself be maimed.
The world is frail, Kwon seems to be saying, pastor-like. Seek sturdy things. Occasionally—very occasionally—he writes of “a pretty agony,” and one senses that the poet is holding these things too tightly, in his fist, held out from his body, instead of letting them breathe. Agony can be beautiful, yes: but only to the viewer, and only at a vast remove. And yet this poet’s best work glimpses both beauty and agony from up close, right up against the glass, or no glass at all, where “To find trees, we take the all-nighter; the all-nighter brings us to the shore,” where “the ice-block he stole as a boy breathed,” where “What never showed / was sandfish,” where, “Through oval / window, you take / the joke // to passing clouds,” the poet identifying himself as “I, a brazen hussy,” and in the brassy, sinister weirdness of “when persimmons were mist, / a bazooka ruth a lotus scent.”
The People’s Field closes with “The Kuomintang Had Been Duped,” a long mixed-form poem. Near its end, the poet argues with an unnamed interlocutor, who is criticizing (“as he was taught / by the wealthy radical / philosophers he had translated / and published”) Park Chung Hee, who was President of South Korea from 1963 until his assassination sixteen years later. Kwon has to remind his imperious critic that the reason
he was able to travel
to Seoul and enjoy
the Westin Chosun
as well as the priceful fish
glands and eggs, was precisely
because of Park
Chung Hee, who is not
who is no
no
no , no
certainly not, no
no . . .
The poet does not specify whether or not his speaker is a Westerner, but one can feel the anger and the pain of one who is called upon to defend one’s home, not through or against physical violence, but against the violence wrought by language—particularly the language of so-called radical European philosophers—such violence that at stanza’s end the language altogether ceases to be anything but a cascade of no, the subjects of the negations themselves erased. The poem ends with an image of a solitary farmer who has “tied
his squash so tight and thick
in transparent plastic bags, only
to find squash prices had gone
to shit, having become the year’s
biggest harvest
The poet watches the farmer curse, climb back onto his scooter and “rattle off” into the distance. One feels, reading this, that the cursing farmer—who has borne another crop for nothing—is actually the poet himself. Poetry provides little to eat. Kwon knows it, and yet this field of poems, transparent as they are, has not been born for nothing. However “chary of flavors” it may be, this field—let us call it a broth—is bursting with them.
Nathan Knapp’s writing has most recently appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Brooklyn Rail, and 3:AM Magazine.
Banner image: Hunter Weatherly, reproduced under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.