Choi Seungja begins with poetry of abjection and alienation: “I’m nobody’s disciple, / nobody’s friend. / I’m a body seized by premonition, a daughter of darkness dreaming / in weeds, in a bog.” Or: “Nobody raised me. / I was nothing from the beginning, / sleeping in a rat’s hole, / nibbling on the flea’s liver, / dying absentmindedly, in any old place.” It goes without saying that this sense of radical and, so to speak, ontological isolation is linked to a desperate desire for connection, for love—but hopelessly: “When I say I love you and grab your hand, / the loneliness of existence hangs on my ten fingers.” Choi’s first book in English translation, Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, also includes a few rather heavy-handed satirical poems about men—for instance, a certain Mr. Pon Kagya who is opened by the door to his office, eaten by his lunch, and stuffed into his pay envelope’s pocket. But her most powerful poetry is really the first-person cry of a soul in anguish—a female soul in what one of her translators, Cathy Park Hong, describes as a paternalistic traditional society where an independent woman appears aberrant. The poet shows herself to be the victim of this culture, but at the same time, uses the display of her wounds to attack it. This unhappy intensity holds us with a glittering eye, like the ancient mariner, and we cannot choose but to hear the keening that in person we might want to flee; it leaves the reader stunned but fascinated. The voice that ignores social barriers is uncanny and therefore transfixing; and who knows how, but it casts its spell even through the thick medium of translated text. In any case—assuming that the five sections of this book correspond to the five books, published in South Korea between 1981 and 2010, from which it has been drawn, though this is nowhere made explicit—Choi seems quickly enough to have found her power on the other side of this abjection: “Old nihilist, you’ll erupt with a bloody, hearty laugh, / and begin to operate, silently, the machine of nothingness / with your old body.” If I am right in my understanding of the book’s structure, this “old body soaked in poetry and blood” would have been at most thirty-two years old; in any case, these poems come after ones in which the poet gives her age as thirty and thirty-three. In others she is thirty-seven and forty; she uses the calendar as a mirror. The uncanny voice is the one that tears down the boundary between life and its supposed opposite: “Then, finally, won’t a road of death-in-life or life-in-death / open anew?” Again, I think of Coleridge: “The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, / Who thicks man’s blood with cold.” Choi, it seems, would willingly take on that haunting role. Or at least she formerly would have done so. The poems in the book’s last section are not so blood-curdling. They even take on a valedictory tone (“This world is a faraway world”) and in them the “I” recedes in importance, yielding space to the world out there—moon, clouds, birds—but also to metaphysical insights, and political ones too: “Why does the world / become a world / only once it thoroughly rots? / / The big secret / is capital.” The fierceness of the earlier work could not be maintained indefinitely; a certain gimlet-eyed equanimity must have become necessary for survival.
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Choi Seungja, Phone Bells Keep Ringing for Me, translated by Won-Chung Kim and Cathy Park Hong, edited by Joyelle McSweeney, is published by Action Books, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.