DROP ON YOUR KNEES, PETALS OF DRIED FLOWERS: On the poetry of Tanya Ko Hong

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 If I could leave my senses

I would be no trouble.

You don’t give food

to the fish you’ve caught.

Fr Yeobo, 2015 (Rattle)

 

 

In the sometimes harshly direct and confrontational world of today’s American social dialogue, it is refreshing to experience the poetics of a writer and activist like Tanya Ko Hong. A Southern Cal Korean-American and émigré living in the rough and tumble of Southern California, she has achieved a remarkable feat – paying deference to a very confrontational American aesthetic environment while maintaining allegiance to the deftly symbolic indirectness of expression found in great Korean poetry of the last century.

 

Leonore Hildebrandt, Creative writing faculty, University of Maine, calls her work ‘sparse and precise.’ John Rosenwald, Co-editor, Beloit Poetry Journal, calls it ‘compressed and intense.’

Close. Ellen Bass gets closer than that, noting in Ko Hong’s poetry something ‘spare, elegant…beauty juxtaposed with pain so deep it’s almost impossible to put into words.’

 

What it is – the nearly inutterable tension of the 'Indirect Gaze' -- is a covert presentation of image with hints of socio-political intent beneath it. A veneer. The peasant rabbits lighting an artistocratic tiger’s tail on fire. A man exiled from his home and family who can’t go more than a couple of miles before his feet start to hurt.

 

A thing firmly rooted in traditional Korean poetry and folk art.

 

I know. In the 1970s i attained some fluency in Korean during a couple as a Peace Corps volunteer – and not incidentally, was exposed to the particular flavor of Korean arts - including the covertly suggestive folk paintings which ridiculed the aristocratic class; and more particularly, the rebellious political undertones of wanderer poets, set against the otherwise agrarian/Confucian world, in poems of Tae Hung Ha ( Zigzag we climb up Namsan Mountain/ Lubdub, lubdub, our hearts beat loud and fast/With hazy drunken eyes), and Pak Mok Wol (The hills surround me/and tell me to live my life/sow the seeds/till the land).

 

Through long winter nights in my little room in Suncheon, Cholla Nam Do, I read and reread the works of these 20th century authors in Korean and in English, and was struck by their remarkable ability to achieve socio-political impact through clear focus on natural imagery and folk scenes; and the careful use of those images to offer points of view on very specific social and political themes of their day.

 

In fact, this Indirect Gaze technique should not be thought of as terribly new to the student of poetry in America -- it goes back to the early 20th century, after all, and the Imagists/ Think Ezra Pound, and his exploration of the precise techniques he found in Chinese poetry, and attempt to represent -- in poems like River Merchant’s Wife (The paired butterflies are already yellow with August/Over the grass in the West Garden;/ They hurt me. I grow older).

 

Tanya Ko Hong – born and raised in South Korea, emigre to the United States at the age of eighteen, Antioch MFA grad and writer in both English and Korean -- brings all that to 21rst century Los Angeles. The traditions of Korean poetry and imagism find new ground, as Hong applies the fertile literary canon of indirect creative commentary to new social and political purpose.

 

To be sure she is capable of shooting straight from the hip on a variety of politically charged issues, including women’s rights and immigrant. More often than not, however, her poems are address her experience as a Korean-American -- as in this longish poem which recounts her family’s device for obtaining permission to come to America.

 

Rumor of war,

when the Korean President,

Park Chung Hee got shot.

Mother wanted us to go

to America,

the strongest, happiest and richest place.

But how to get us there?

Fr Look Back, II Paper Divorce, (Cultural Weekly ‘15)

 

Exploration of the immigrant experience is ‘in her wheelhouse,’ it would seem. In Generation 1.5, published in the 1990s, Ko Hong provides a full book of poems on the immigrant experience.

Just last year she hosted an event at Beyond Baroque providing a platform for fellow immigrant poets to tell stories of their journey to America – such as So Hyun Chang's poem "Sugarcane Arirang" recounting the first Korean Americans' long days in the sugar fields of their new country.

 

But Ko Hong's field of vision for choosing socio-political subject is broader than that, as we may see in her well-regarded tackling of the story of 'Comfort Workers,' the sexual enslavement of more than 200,000 Korean women by the Japanese during World War II.

 

In this carefully sequenced poem we can see the poet's ability to straddle the conventions of contemporary American directness with the more traditional indirectness, imagism and symbolism of Korean aesthetics.

 

Here’s a section from the poem, reproduced in full :

 

1939, CHINJU, SOUTH KYANGSAN PROVINCE

We are going to do Senninbari, right? No, Choingsindae, Women’s Labor Corps Same thing, right? Earn money become new woman come back home—

Holding tiny hands
red fingertips
bong soong ah
balsam flower red
together and colored by summer’s end
red fingertips

ripening persimmons
bending over the Choga roofs
that fade into distance

When the truck crosses over the last hill
leaving our hometown in the dust
Soonja kicks off her white shoes Ko Mu Shin

Fr Comfort Women, (LunchTicket.org, Beloit Poetry Journal ’14)

 

Ko Hong’s intent focus on ripening persimmons bending over rooftops (and the kicking off of white shoes by one of the women as the truck takes off, leaving their home town in the dust) is symbol and image at its best -- and firmly rooted in Korean poetic tradition.

 

Yet, in deference to her American audience which may be inured to the quietude of such writing, she has added a prefatory and italicized dialogue which grabs her audience’s attention.

 

An effective device to help explicate the more subtle, sidelong aperture provided by the poet’s careful choice of image and singularly nuanced voice. Just enough to grab audience attention, amid the cacophony and buffeting of a 21rst century poetry reading.

 

water is boiling in the rusty kettle

dark clouds cover half the moon

a yellow cab stops in the dark…

…drop on your knees

petals of dried flowers

--Fr. Mustard Flower, 2017 (Los Angeles Poet Society)

 

There are a lot of ways to get the balance wrong. Fortunately for those who know her work, often enough Tanya Ko Hong gets it right. And for this, those among us looking for a little nuance and indirection in the head-on world of rant and confrontation -- ie grace -- might drop on our knees, and give thanks.