신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin

Poetry Reading on Saturday June 21st at ArtStart in St. Paul

7:30 P.M. ArtStart

1459 St. Clair Ave.

St. Paul

Bring your lawn chair or blanket and enjoy an evening of poetry, berries, and sparkling beverages in ArtStart's backyard (inside if raining) near the time of a full moon.

Roseann Lloyd, Todd Boss, Norita Dittberner-Jax, Tim Nolan, Margaret Hasse, Jill Breckenridge, Sun Yung Shin, Sharon Chmielarz, William Reichard, and Heid Erdrich.

Currently reading...

Books of the week

In the Pines by Alice Notley
Magnetic North by Linda Gregerson

This Thursday 2/21 please sit by the fire with me at the Hamline Midway Library in St. Paul

Hi!

I hope folks can come to this special library reading--support public libraries (and their support of writers!)--I'll be reading a lot of new work, including a new longer series called Kingdom of the Light, Kingdom of the Dark, a persona poem in the voice of Satan--a meditation on the nature of authority and post-lapsarian eros. Plus it will be a balmy 18 degrees on Thursday--why not celebrate with some poetry?

Come keep me company. 

Here are the details:

1558 West Minnehaha Avenue

St. Paul, MN 55104

651-642-0293

branch.hamline@ci.stpaul.mn.us

Maps, Directions & Bus Routes

Five weeks of readings by some of Minnesota's acclaimed authors. Coffee, cookies, and cider provided

by Ginkgo Coffeehouse.

Supported by Micawber's Books and the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library.Thursday, February 21 at 7 p.m.

Throughout Skirt Full of Black, Sun Yung Shin uses her cultural dualities as a Korean adoptee to create a new language for traversing the minefields of identity. Each poem in her resonant collection reveals the very personal consequences of the political, social and economic forces at work in the life of every adoptee.

Here was/is the rest of the series!

	Thursday, January 31 at 7 p.m. Poet, musician, essayist - Bill Holm is one of a kind. In Windows of Brimnes, his most ambitious book to date, he repairs to his cottage in Iceland to reflect on the state of our country today and what we might learn from the land of his ancestral roots.
	Thursday, February 7 at 7 p.m. Lise Erdrich’s first collection of stories, Night Train, offers a sharp-humored and powerful glimpse into rural communities and contemporary American Indian life and culture. Set in the small towns and reservations of northwestern Minnesota and western North Dakota, her lightning-quick tales capture the moment when the pressures of daily life collide with the insidiousness of history.
	Thursday, February 14 at 7 p.m. In search of contemporary Asian America, celebrated photographer Wing Young Huie - the only member of his family not born in China - traveled with his wife, Tara, through nearly forty states to explore and document the funny, touching, and sometimes strange intersection of Asian American and American cultures. Looking for Asian America illustrates their rich and surprising journey across the United States.
	Thursday, February 21 at 7 p.m. Throughout Skirt Full of Black, Sun Yung Shin uses her cultural dualities as a Korean adoptee to create a new language for traversing the minefields of identity. Each poem in her resonant collection reveals the very personal consequences of the political, social and economic forces at work in the life of every adoptee.
	Wednesday, February 27 at 7 p.m. Mary Logue returns to her acclaimed Claire Watson series with Maiden Rock, a tragic, personal follow up to Poison Heart. Claire’s daughter Meg is struggling with depression - after an all-night high school Halloween party, Meg’s best friend was found dead of an apparent suicide at the foot of Maiden Rock. Now Claire is faced with a growing trend in her rural town - meth labs, doped-up teenagers, and young girls just looking for a way to escape their small-town lives.

Very lovely review of Skirt Full of Black

I was so happy and grateful to read this review from LUNA! Go read their journal! http://lunapoetry.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html

<blush>

Sunday, December 16, 2007

Review: Skirt Full of Black

Skirt Full of Black
SUN YUNG SHIN
Coffee House Press, $15


Transmogrifying Type


In Skirt Full of Black, Sun Yung Shin’s first collection of poetry, our expectation that the collection will entertain a meaningful and creative dialectic between American English and Korean languages is quickly and fruitfully complicated. It is true that almost all of Shin’s poems take language as at least part of their subject, but she is less concerned with a simple contrast of Korean versus English; rather, she is interested in some of the forms in which language manifests (oral, written, in typeface, as icon) and this leads her into a thematic and formal examination of the tension between spoken/written language, written/typed characters, and human/technological voices. She opens with, “MACRO-ALTAIC”:

“Sometimes even the surface forms defy etymology.”

In place of reading, two doors open
Away from each. Door—paper—door—

Because in her opening poem, a reader grasps the relationship between the textures of the first two voices readily and they stand in stark contrast, we might expect the two-voice formula to return to guide us through our reading of this maze-like collection where conjoined twins split and reform, human typewriters work in pork-processing plants and enormous flowers budding petals of countless histories shake loose one message at a time. The first voice, the one in quotes, reads like an out-of-date textbook on how to translate (Korean into English?) but as easily it could be something else (maybe a primer on structural sociology?), but in “MACRO-ALTAIC,” and throughout the collection, Shin does not acknowledge where she cribs the quoted voices or if she is cribbing at all We can call this first voice the “textbook voice,” to help us keep things straight. The second voice, the “poetic voice,” is the image-driven voice that we encounter often. A few lines later, in the same poem:

“Korean contrast structurally with European languages such as English in a number of ways.”

Your sister’s spirit escapes through a pinprick in the paper wall.
The shaman kneels at her side as before a meal.

In the first poem we can begin to understand how the images created in Shin’s more poetic voice operate with the textbook voice. This makes for an engaging play. Anyone who spends time though with Skirt Full of Black, will come to realize that Shin is interested in this play for about three pages.

The poems that follow build on the concept of multiple textures set-up by the first poem in increasingly alarming and rewarding ways. Images fly out of control, across time periods and continents and voices intermingle to the point of assimilation. In the second poem, “KUAI-ZI,” both voices from the first poem return in similar typographic manifestations (“poetic voice” and “textbook voice”), but other voices show up here to complicate the picture. Now we have a voice that appears in italics and dialogue. This voice reminds us of prose fiction and fairytale:

“We are cannibals,” said a man to his wife, in a picture. He took a picture of the page of words and saved it for processing later.

We also have a kind of bold, capitalized computer print-out voice interspersed:

THIS PERSON IS THE “STICKER,” HIS JOB IS TO SLIT THE THROATS OF THE COWS AS THEY PASS BY ON THE ASEMBLY LINE.

or

THIS IS THE “KNOCKER,” ADMINISTERING THE STUN BOLT TO THE COW’S BRAIN.

And additionally we have the complication of the earlier voices; that is, they are unstable, they do not return and sound the same. They assume different postures. This voice falls somewhere between “poetic” and “textbook”:

Chinese chopstick, called kua-zi (quick little fellow with bamboo heads) are nine to ten inches long and rectangular with a blunt end.

And I think we have at least a second textbook as well to end the poem:

“Each soldier is an individual.”

I focus on the style and font to lead us to content. Over time, a reader might be tempted to expect certain things when they see a certain style font appear on the page, but a reader with those expectations will be quickly disappointed, because Shin adapts the fonts and styles on a per poem basis. The bold, capitalized computer print-out voice returns in the next poem only to reveal itself as the voice of a very specific typewriter that is important to the collection as a whole. As readers, we begin to understand the necessity of a multiplicity:

By the 1920s, virtually all typewrites were “look-alikes”

only in capital letter: QWERTY: WOMAN TYPING: HARD RETURN
(Shin from “OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES…”)

We should not say there are four or even eight different voices at work in Skirt Full of Black; rather there are four or eight or sometimes ten different voices at work in a single poem. Take the book’s longer poem (almost all of section 2), “FLOWER, I, STAME AND POLLEN” for example. Here we see a plethora of styles and voices, from lists to imperatives, stories to truncated lyrics, historical allegory and rules and, perhaps, one might even say, a good old prose poem, but that comes along with a kind of asterisk dance that is dangerously close to a linguistic expression…

The beauty of this book is that we are always slipping into new forms and new styles with and within each poem. Never too far away though is Shin’s disarming poetic. One is reminded of a book like Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, by Marilyn Chin. On the jacket Chin describes Skirt Full of Black in relation to form, things like “collage of ancient fragments” and “catalogue of associative statements;” but these comments I think do not acknowledge the rigor of this project and how seriously Shin’s poems feel rooted in their new and challenging forms. The poems themselves are visual landscapes, typographically speaking, and they are very controlled compositions. On the cover: a monochromatic orange typewriter on baby blue background, where from a sheer dark gray sky letters rain either out from or into the typewriter and solid, in a yellow sheet of paper feeding out from the typewriter, we see the title and the author. The typewriter is a guide throughout the book, a control mechanism, that lets us know our language and our space, however unharnessed it may seem, has been mitigated. The typewriter provides also an early touchstone for some of the other kinds of control.

All Shin’s titles appear in bold capital letters, which kind of loom over the poems as signposts. They do not feel oppressive in their looming though, authoritative yes, but rather like things to take note of on your way by into the body of the poem. Sometimes they are a single word and sometimes we come across something like this as a title:

OBVIOUSLY, THESE WERE HOMES RATHER THAN OFFICE MACHINE, MEANT FOR PEOPLE OF LIMITED MEANS WHO NEEDED TO DO SOME OCCASIONAL TYPING

About two-thirds of the way though the book we find a table of the Korean alphabet, divided into vowels and consonants, with Korean symbols and English equivalents. This table guides us through the penultimate section of the book where we find spare, delicate poems that seem to center around uniformly one-word titles the table invites us to translate and speak. With the introduction of this table, we settle down, the page becomes less crowded and more of a portrait than a landscape. We see in this penultimate section and as well in the last, that there is indeed a place for elegy in the collection. We find poems like “LEFTOVERS,” that have a more typical contemporary American poetic:

“I’m a Gay Dad”
T-shirt on a young Korean man
Holding hands lightly with his girlfriend

“Pity, all of this Westernization”

The English language is true
Nonsense, everywhere

And “WORSHIP”:

There is a prime number
That begs to be reduced

Resist the beggars
They have no rights

Is this Mass the same everywhere there is God
Even though different people eat differently

When we reach the end of Skirt Full of Black, we do find ourselves asking the question: what is total work of the book? What have I just been through and what has it asked of me? Did I pass the test?

We also find ourselves wondering, what would have happened should we have ended still at the mercy of the out-of-control-many-voiced typewriter? If Shin had pushed us to the brink and never calmed down? Or conversely, what if the Korean alphabet opened the book, grounding us in that aspect of the project?

Part of what a reader walks away with is the idea of the ambidextrous voice: a voice that understands space and time are dangerously out of control in the most sublime sense and can reflect that; a voice that can distill space and time into beautiful, abstract, tight-knit impressions that challenge the relationship between American English and Korean, language and sound. Shin understands we all share a lingua mater, there is no indivisible sound in any language; she dedicates the collection to “the worldwide Korean diaspora—six to seven million overseas Koreans living in 140 countries.” As I walk away from this collection, I take with me a sense from one of the Siamese twin poems in the middle of the collection, “THAT CAME TO BE SPLIT INTO A PLURALITY,” where Shin’s ideas of twinning, conjoined twins, adoption, and linguistics come to a head in the imbalance and symmetry between two simple statements:

That we each have a number assigned to us

and:

That we each have a name, or three assigned to us

by Thomas Cook

I have some new poems in Coconut 11...

Coconut Eleven—featuring new poems by Liz Waldner, Carla Harryman, Dorothea Lasky, Chris Pusateri, Peter Davis, Melissa Benham, Amber Nelson, Kismet Al-Hussaini, Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert, Anna Fulford, Marco Giovenale, Michael Sikkema, Sun Yung Shin, Maureen Thorson, Jordan Davis, Mara Vahratian, Philip Metres, Janet Holmes, Fritz Ward, Susan Scarlata, Jeni Olin, Jon Link, and Rebecca Hazelton—is now live on the web.

Thanks for the shout-out from the blog Hitler's Mustache!

So I lied, one more post...

If you must buy one book of poetry this year (and you must buy many more than one! but...) make it this devastating, searing, important book:

Fearless poet: Douglas Kearney

Run, don't walk, to get FEAR, SOME by Douglas Kearney. Not only an extremely talented poet who will make you laugh and cry and rage and wail, but a very personable & nice dude.

http://www.douglaskearney.com/

Book of last week: Inventions of the March Hare

I finally got around to reading this book--which I really enjoyed. There's some surprisingly (to me) ribald pieces.

This volume is special to me because it's edited by the formidable scholar Christopher Ricks. I took one Shakespeare class with Prof. Ricks during my first year at Boston University. He was the most charming person--his intelligence was so enlivening. He had our class over for wine and cheese one evening; he spoke about Bob Dylan, one of his areas of expertise. I remember seeing his much younger wife and young child (a daughter?).

My formal education as an English undergraduate was totally remiss in both poetry, aside from the Victorians, and early 20th century American writers. I read mostly European existentialists and post-war authors as well as African American novelists of the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights era. I'm taking this year to engage in some auto-didactic reading to fill in some major gaps.

Other writers on my list...forthcoming in the next post as my son is "starving" right now. Duties...

Thanks for the great review, CURVE magazine!

Download curve_review_of_sfob.pdf