One of the most enriching, forward-thinking, fastest-growing online creative communities flourishing right now is the Poetry community, especially in those scenes that center on marginalized voices — Women, POC, Neurodivergent, and LGBTQ. Poetry Spotlight is a feature aiming to showcase the work of some of the most talented creators we’ve discovered making waves on the Internet literary circles, inside or outside the mainstream. On this ninth installment, we focus on the poetry of the great Jean Yoon.
Jean is a writer, artist, translator, performer, and second-generation Korean-American itinerant whose writing has been previously published in jubilat, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Open Letters Monthly, Hypocrite Reader, and others. Jean plays synthesizer and sings in Fleshband and currently resides/survives in South Bend, Indiana. Their most recent chapbook, To A T, was released in August 2017, on Ghost City Press, and you can get it here.
from To A T
I walk behind you through Forest Park, Harvard Square, down the horse trail at Nehalem Bay, in the reeds by Flax Pond, up the cliff at Cape Disappointment, on the raised path around the cedar swamp.
Like in a dream, I cannot close the distance. The light is overcast and diffuse, electric, sodium-orange and romantic, dappled through the old-growth canopy.
It is silent in the scene. I lift the camera to my eye, frame your figure growing smaller, lower it again. I take a point of ice, a chunk of stone, a knob of wood. I grind it into my hand until it’s smooth and my palm is bleeding and raw. It stings to touch you in the light of aubades.
*
You introduced me to Ben Lerner’s writing
In 2013. I read Leaving the Atocha Station
In one or two sittings, in lieu of writing
My undergrad thesis in linguistics or doing
Much of anything else. My take on the book
May well be influenced by the fact of what
I was avoiding when I read it. I resented and also
Enjoyed it—twinned affects, median to plain distaste
And a subtler mix of envy, sympathy, and identification
With the narrator’s incessant, narcissistic, performative self-
Abnegation and his self-congratulating aspirations
To engage others with humanistic intentions
While relentlessly arranging every event
Of misunderstanding and -communication
Into a solipsistic narrative that burnishes
His self-conceived image of the sensitive, gifted,
Sexually desirable, masculine subject which he claims to disdain
While clearly longing to embody. Long runs
Of grandiloquent language; elaborate ego-ouroboros
Mantled in latinate phrasings; a plastic narcissus
Honed on the lathe of erudition
To a restlessly driving point—I can see why you liked it.
The prose does dazzle, devil in its details, energized
By a stream-of-consciousness pacing that frequently bucks
The forward-flowing measure of chronological time
In favor of an associative vortex that bends
One’s attention to the whim of the narrator’s relentless
Attentions to assure itself of his goodness. One relates
So absolutely, it’s almost as if I could have written it.
But this self-slippage signals the perforation
That tears me from the text by a clear and indelible margin,
Meaning, even if I could, I wouldn’t.
Meaning, when I read Lerner and feel like his narrator—
Literate, obnoxious, sexually desperate—I do not become
What I can not be—a white man from Kansas,
Privileged with the benefit of the doubt for his
Contextual foreignness, privileged to sit
At the center of a world in which the world
Is accessory to himself. In this position, there is power,
Pleasure, there is purchasing the preview of what
Such privilege bestows. And this is what passes
For the sleight of transposition that permits us
To call it a work of fiction, to call it enough
To just describe what it’s like to live
In the gravitational center of things
That the culture determines you get to be in.
Wherever you go, there you are, assigning your values.
This privilege I refuse because I cannot use it.
MY PROJECT
IT WILL ENFOLD EMAILS, JOURNALS, NOTES, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND DREAMS, AND SOME POETRY!
ITS SECTIONS SHOULD STAND ALONE THEMATICALLY, BUT INTERLOCK AT KEY VERTICES! IT SHOULD COOLLY EMANATE A SENSE OF EASY CONTINUITY, OF THINGS THAT “HANG TOGETHER”!
IT SHOULD SHOW OFF MY LINGUISTIC DEXTERITY IN ITS INVENTIVE COINAGE OF METAPHOR AND ANALOGY WITHOUT DISCLOSING MY SUSPICION OF LANGUAGE (AND BY ASSOCIATION, MYSELF, AS ITS CONDUIT OR AGENT)!
IT SHOULD PROPEL YOU THROUGH—LIKE A “LAZY RIVER”, OR INTESTINAL PERISTALSIS!
IT SHOULD HAVE A SHAPE LIKE CAVATAPPI—IT SHOULD HOLD ITS SAUCE!
I WANT TO TRICK MYSELF INTO DISARMING THE MECHANISMS I USE TO PROTECT MY MOST LOATHSOME, REVOLTING, AND WORST OF ALL, BANAL SECRETS!
I WANT TO TALK TO YOU IN FRONT OF ALL THESE PEOPLE, THESE LILYWHITE WOMEN IN LULULEMON IN LINE AT THE JUICE BAR IN THE LOBBY! THE WAY THE SPACE CENTERS THEIR GYM-TRIM BODIES—IN PROSCENIUM, THREE-QUARTER FACE, OPENING TOWARD THE ANTICIPATION OF AUDIENCE!!
IT SHOULD EXCITE, EXHAUST, EXASPERATE, REPEAT—LEAVE THEM ELATED, HYSTERICAL, JOLTED, REVOLTED!
