21st Century Korean American PoetryThe First Decade

Robert GROTJOHN(Robert GROTJOHN) 한국현대영미시학회 2018 현대영미시연구 Vol.24 No.1

The main purposes of this essay are to compile a bibliography of all the book-length collections of English-language Korean American poetry that have been published in the U.S. through 2017, to outline some possible means of categorizing or classifying the books, and to briefly introduce the work of each poet who published his or her first collection in the first decade of the 21st century. In suggesting various possibilities for categorizing these poets, I insist that none of those possibilities are definitive or absolute. From 1972 to 2017, 47 Korean American poets published 84 collections of poetry, 17 in the 20th century, 27 from 2000 to 2009, and 40 from 2010 to 2017. Key suggestions for classification include a poet’s generation in America, gender, themes, content, and aesthetic choices. The fruitful diversity of Korean American poetry reflects the state of American poetry in general. The extent to which the poets use or ignore their Korean heritage is part of that larger diversity but also shows a unique place in the various poetic and intellectual communities to which the writers might belong.

Ekphrasis and Whiteness in Recent American Poetry

( Robert Grotjohn ) 한국영어영문학회 2014 영어 영문학 Vol.60 No.3

The ekphrastic has become a frequent exercise for contemporary American poets. This study adds to the growing research on varieties of ekphrasis by discussing the various functions of whiteness in works by four poets. Natasha Trethewey, in her most recent volume, Thrall (2012), offers a series of poems inspired by 17th- and 18th-century Latin American casta paintings, which depict and catalogue variations of mixed-race couples and their children. After considering the eclipsing of whiteness in Trethewey’s “ethnic ekphrasis,” I will turn to the whiteness in Robert Hass’s ekphrastic on Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk titled “Art and Life,” from his National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning collection Time & Materials (2008), as an example of “elliptical ekphrasis.” The play on whiteness continues with Alice Fulton’s “fractal ekphrasis in “Close,” from her volume Felt (2001), in which she considers Joan Mitchell’s White Territory, an abstract expressionist painting. Finally, Harryette Mullens’ “Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language” from Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), challenges the traditions of the ekphrastic and of poetry itself in her “post-ethnic/postekphrastic ekphrasis.”

The Dark Angel of Fine Clothes to the Jew

Robert David Grotjohn 한국현대영미시학회 2012 현대영미시연구 Vol.18 No.2

While Langston Hughes’s 1927 volume Fine Clothes to the Jew has been widely admired as one of his best works, there have been no sustained efforts to read it as a cohesive whole. This essay shows how the work coheres through the central importance of its central poem, “Angels Wings.” A careful reading shows that the poem reveals a blues theology that runs throughout the volume. By establishing the significance of blues theology to the book, this study shows how Fine Clothes to the Jew speaks to and includes the larger African-American community through a holistic theology that encompasses the profane as well as the sacred. Such a theology also signifies on and overturns a sycophantic version of double consciousness by elevating the “low-down” people of the black community. In that elevation, Hughes refuses the role of the poet as an isolated artist but writes from a communitarian aesthetic. While the blues poetry of Hughes has received considerable attention, the connection of those blues to African-American theology has been neglected and adds a new perspective to the understanding of Hughes’s poetry. That connection also suggests a parallel with Korean minjung theology and literature as an amalgamation of originary belief systems and Christianity.

Music, Memory, and Transgression in Ed Bok Lee’s Poetry

Robert David Grotjohn 한국현대영미소설학회 2013 현대영미소설 Vol.20 No.3

This study uses research on collective memory, music and memory, transnationalism, and transgressive pedagogy to consider the ways in which the Korean American poet Ed Bok Lee presents music as a means of passing on collective memory and critiquing contemporary Korean popular culture. He identifies such memories as giving him a Korean “orientation of the soul” that he inherits from his parents, and he depicts that orientation in poems set in the U.S., especially “Inside Lake Heron,” from Real Karaoke People (2005). He claims to find that orientation most especially in the countryside when he returns to Korea. That orientation turns to disorientation in the cityscape of contemporary Seoul, as depicted through the musical motifs of “Chosun 5.0,” from Whorled (2011). Lee presents hallyu, particularly its musical manifestations, as a consumerist project that neglects Korean culture and history. Participation in that project through the unreflective consumption of k-pop and other manifestations of hallyu, implicates students in the neoliberal global economies that enforce “repetitions of the same” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) through the “liturgical” (Jan Assmann) reinforcement of that sameness. While Lee's poems can contribute to a transgressive, progressive pedagogy as advocated by Hyeyurn Chung and King-kok Cheung, one must also be aware of Lee's essentializing “orientation.” On the terms suggested by Donald Pease, Lee's essential tradition demonstrates that the transnational is also inescapably diasporic.

Sandra Lim`s “Errant Wildness”: From Immigrant Gurlesque to Antinomian Tradition

( Robert Grotjohn ) 한국아메리카학회 2016 美國學論集 Vol.48 No.3

This essay explores the poetry of Sandra Lim in The Wilderness and Loveliest Grotesque. Lim`s poetry shows a “gurlesque” aesthetic based in a feminist irreverence. “Errant wildness,” a term Lim uses of the colonial poet Edward Taylor, suggests a quality of gurlesqueness. This analysis first briefly suggests her location relative to the historical American wilderness and introduces her gurlesque challenges to masculinist American literature. Second, it considers how she can be located in sympathy with other American immigrant writers. Third, it investigates Lim`s linguistic errancy as it might be attributed to Lim as the child of immigrants. Fourth, it examines how her Korean background is distanced from her aesthetic via autobiographical uncertainty, countering common expectations for ethnic representation. Finally, it proposes that Lim`s work might be located in the “antinomian” tradition of American women`s writing as advanced by Susan Howe.

Song as “Event” in Ed Bok Lee’s Poetry

Robert Grotjohn 21세기영어영문학회 2013 21세기영어영문학회 학술대회 Vol.2013 No.09

Bad Subjects and the Transnational Minjung: The Poetry of Jason Koo and Ed Bok Lee

( Robert Grotjohn ) 한국영어영문학회 2018 영어 영문학 Vol.64 No.3

In light of Korean inclusion of its diaspora as part of the nation, a “creolized” approach that brings together constructions of the bad subject of Asian American studies with conceptions of the Korean minjung grounds an analysis of two poets as they might be considered from a bi-national, Korean and U.S. American, perspective. The poets Ed Bok Lee and Jason Koo show different ways of being the bad subject. Lee is clearly a bad American subject, resisting American white racial hegemony, and his poetry often addresses a kind of American minjung multiculturalism, as is shown in poems from his first two books Real Karaoke People and Whorled. He challenges some aspects of contemporary Korea, and might be a kind of Korean bad subject in those challenges. Koo, on the other hand, resists the call to bad subjectivity, so that his poetry may not fit the preferred paradigm of Asian American studies, as he recognizes. As he resists that paradigm, he also gives little attention to his Korean heritage, so his not-bad American subjectivity becomes bad Korea subjectivity. He recovers some measure of badness in the final poem of Man on Extremely Small Island when he connects briefly to his Korean heritage and his Asian American present. The creolized juxtaposition of the bad subject with the minjung suggests the use of these poems in considering both American and Korean society.

Mongrel Poethics: Harryette Mullen`s Sleeping with the Dictionary

( Robert Grotjohn ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2015 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.23 No.1

Harryette Mullen writes out of a problematized or mongrelized lineage of black writing. Her exploratory, miscegenated aesthetic in Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) creates a kind of “poethic” as theorized by Joan Retallack. A poethics creates a conspiracy with the reader against hegemonic discourses. Mullen’s poethic opposes American fundamentalism, and her poems create vital, complex engagements with the contemporary world. She critiques rejection of difference. She subverts neoliberal discourses. She highlights the politics of conventional statements embedded in Althusserian ISAs. By forcing examination of the ideologies underlying everyday language, Mullen encourages an everyday poethics for an engaged and questioning form of life.

Hijacking the Type: Cathy Park Hong`s Poetry against Conceptual Whiteness

( Robert Grotjohn ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2016 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.24 No.1

This essay considers the participation of Cathy Park Hong in a movement of diverse writers of color in the U.S. That movement struggles against the white privilege that appropriates non-white ethnicity, as in the work of conceptual poets Vanessa Place and Kenneth Goldsmith, while excluding people of color themselves, as many have argued is the case with the avant-garde and, specifically, conceptual poetry. Hong, among others, has engaged the conceptual poets in essays and recent poems, calling them out for their exclusive and appropriative white privilege. The discussion in which she participates includes many voices in an ethnic pastiche that demonstrates Ramon Saldivar’s theorization of a “post-race” aesthetic. Four poems by Hong, each with a marginalized woman speaker or main character, use that aesthetic to force examination of sexist and racist practices in the American avant-garde.

Translating Resistance: Don Mee Choi, Jiyoon Lee, Eunsong Kim, and Others

Robert David Grotjohn 한국영어영문학회 2019 영어 영문학 Vol.65 No.3

This essay considers Don Mee Choi’s The Morning News Is Exciting and maps several lines between Choi’s work and that of other poets in the community that Anna Maria Hong calls “KAFP” (Korean American Feminist Poetry / Poets), particularly Jiyoon Lee’s Foreigners Folly and Eunsong Kim’s Gospel of Regicide. The analysis builds from the influence of a Deleuzian “rhizomatic” reading strategy and Myung Mi Kim’s fundamental questions of deterritorialization: “What is English now, in the face of mass global migration? How to practice and make plural the written and spoken—grammar, syntaxes, textures, intonations ...” Choi, Lee, and Eunsong Kim write in the deterritorialized space of those ellipses by resisting what Deleuze and Guattari call the “order-words” of neocolonial “grammaticality.” In various temporal and linguistic disruptions, Choi interrogates the neocolonial relationship between the U.S. and South Korea. That interrogation shows rhizomatic lines extending to the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as well as Myung Mi Kim. Choi disorders the connections she sees between military and sexual violence, sometimes with the intertextual aid of Emily Dickinson. Lee creates a persona of “foreignwoman” who is at first cowed by but finally performs a brutal turnabout on “Native speaker,” whom she first encounters as the voice on an EFL cassette. Eunsong Kim resists the order-words of both whiteness and her neo-Confucian ethnic heritage, finding liberation in a traitorous gospel. The exploration of these three poets opens to a brief reflection on the diverse, expanding community of KAFP that defies the grammaticality, political and linguistic, of Standard Englishes and their patriarchal orders.