Phantom Pain Wings E-Book

Kim Hyesoon

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 168

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (USA) Kim Hyesoon here shapeshifts into birds as she explores trauma, grief and parting. Kim mixes folklore and mythology with contemporary psychodramatic realities as she taps into a cremation ceremony, Rimbaud, Agnès Varda, Francis Bacon's portrait of Pope Innocent X, cyclones and more.

Leseprobe

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PRAISE FOR PHANTOM PAIN WINGS

‘PhantomPainWingsis exactly the sort of epic I want to read in these times. Every line is taut, with the poetic beak tugging between infinite and minuscule, aerial and visceral, death and life. Each fragmented image radically shifts perspective – the reader is made to manoeuvre, like a bird attempting to find a perch on a seemingly sheer surface. Grand, fragile, poignant, political, the bird poetry of Kim Hyesoon is the necessary work of our age.’

Sasha Dugdale

‘Kim Hyesoon has been one of my favourite poets for a number of years. Her work, and the collection Phantom PainWings, demonstrates her ability to lean into and out of surreality to get at emotions experienced beyond everyday language.’

Wayne Holloway-Smith, Book of the Year, ThePoetrySociety

‘PhantomPain Wingsdepicts mouths filled with smoke, ash, ice, thumbtacks, silence. Is the poem an orifice, or a flock? This extreme question provides both central and peripheral delight, in ways that resemble a nervous system, but also a city. Of note: the beautiful, surprising and moving ‘Translator’s Diary’ by Don Mee Choi.’

Bhanu Kapil

‘Kim Hyesoon sits at the well of poetry like the soothsayers of old who could see across worlds and time, into the minds of people and non-human beings, while celebrating the cosmic and the everyday in the same breath. PhantomPainWingsconfirms her as one of the world’s best contemporary poets. Surreal and wise, the genius of poetry lives in these poems.’

Sjón

‘To read Kim Hyesoon is to be taken up into language, thrown into the shuddery rhythmic space wherein the reading self must find and reinvent itself in negotiations of grief, violence, power and otherness. Through Don Mee Choi’s attentive and brilliant translations we emerge, knowing ourselves and the world in a new state of perception.’

Deryn Rees-Jones 2

‘Reads like a variety of horror – haunted, grotesque, futureless. I love the way scale works here; both largeness and smallness can be forms of strength, the tiny and the epic … In Kim’s metapoetics, the apparent futility of poetry is part of its surreptitious power.’

Elisa Gabbert, NewYorkTimes, The Best Poetry of 2023

‘Phantom PainWings presents a stunningly original and audacious work in which grief and interventions with patriarchy and war trauma are embodied in a capacious and visceral ventriloquism that Kim Hyesoon calls an “I-do-bird sequence”: “Bird cuts me out / like the way sunlight cuts out shadows // Hole enters/ the spot where I was cut out/ I exit.”’

National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry judging panel

‘There is no thematic break or stylistic rupture in Kim’s poetry, despite the length of her career. The kitchen remains bloody and agonistic, demanding the preparation of yet another family meal. Knives and carcasses and dark orifices exist in otherworldly spaces.’

E. Tammy Kim, The New Yorker

‘My estimation of this author and translator continues to grow with this new collection that also grapples with death, memory and trauma but is even more deeply personal.’

Pierce Alquist, Book Riot

‘Death speaks across, and beyond, many languages. In Choi’s empathic translations, Kim’s poetry takes flight into a resonant and deathless English.’

Srikanth Reddy, The Washington Post

‘Kim Hyesoon continues to make her mark as a major figure in contemporary poetry with the physicality with which she enters her metaphors, breaking down separations of mind and body and of art and politics.’

Rebecca Morgan Frank, Lit Hub

‘Every new book by Kim Hyesoon is a gift … these poems will remain inside me for a long time to come.’

Alexa Frank, Words Without Borders

Phantom Pain Wings

Kim Hyesoon

Translated by Don Mee Choi

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Contents

Title PageMY BELOVED PARTINGBird’s Poetry BookGoing Going GoneDouble S / Double SPhantom Pain WingsBird’s RepetitionSmell of WingsGlimmer—You MustBird Stood as a Question MarkFloor Is Not a FloorGrief Guitar (Etcetera)Farewell FirstGirl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws10 CentimetersCrow’s Eye View 31Inside-Bird and Outside-BirdBirds’ FuneralKorean ZenDouble Dog-Eared PageRegarding Bird’s Respiratory IllnessBird, Scared-StiffTyrannus MelancholicusI SHARPEN THE FOREST AND WRITE A LETTERMailboxC Is for Concealalmost blueAgain, I Need to Ask Poor Yi SangPortrait of FearFilling Out Customs Forms on the Last Day of the MonthCandleMonsterEyetoothLittle PoemMore Tender HeartPostwomanMommy’s ExpansionPre-GhostI Don’t Want to Live Inside This NovelPointed HandwritingCOMMUNITY OF PARTING The Body of PartingYou Can’t Put Your Hands Inside This BoxFly, Hospital!Winter Solstice RecipeBird SicknessIs There White Light for Us?P— P—Bird’s DiaryShredded BirdDon’t Fly in This CountryBird ShamanIsn’t That Photo Black and White?Adverbs, FlyJellyfish Are Ninety Percent WaterWHY DO WOMEN THINK THAT ANIMALS CAN SPEAK?Eternal BathroomVanished Mommy Vanished KitchenThe StretcherNotAbortion BoatRed-Bean HandstandFace That Refuses AnesthesiaA Blizzard WarningChorusI Want to Marry My GrandmaH Is for HideousOwlBragging About My DressBeneath the dark cover of the cart / splendid coffins made of ebony / are swiftly dragged by the strong mares / with shiny dark-blue hairAutism, 1Autism, 1000StraitjacketPrincess NaklangWoman’s WomanHypnosis WomanBird Rider: An EssayTranslator’s DiaryCopyright

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910

MY BELOVED PARTING

11

Bird’s Poetry Book

This book is not really a book

It’s an I-do-bird sequence

a record of the sequence

When I take off my shoes, stand on the railing

and spread my arms with eyes closed

feathers poke out of my sleeves

Bird-cries-out-from-me-day record

I-do-bird-day record

as I caress bird’s cheeks

Air is saturated with wounds

Beneath the wounds matted over me

bird’s cheekbones are viciously pointed

yet its bones crack easily when gripped

The birth sequence of such a tiny bird

Poetry ignores

the I-do-bird-woman sequence

Woman-is-dying-but-bird-is-getting-bigger sequence

She says, The pain is killing me

When my hands are tied and my skirt rips like wings

I can finally fly

I was always able to fly like this

Suddenly she lifts her feet

Translation-of-a-certain-bird’s-chirping record

of I-do-bird-below-the-railing

sequence

Night’s carcass bloats

Waves of tormented spirits

One bird12

All the nights of the world

Bird-carrying-the-night’s-nipple-

over-the-pointed-as-an-awl-Mount-Everest sequence

Bird with dark eyes has shrunken

Bird has shrunken enough to be cupped in my hands

Bird mumbles something incomprehensible even when my lips touch its beak

Bird’s tongue is as delicate as a bud

as thin as the tongue of a fetus

The tiny bird’s

kicks-off-the-blanket-kicks-my-body-

kicks-the-dirt-and-exits sequence

I end up doing I-do-bird even if I resist doing it

I end up saying this is not a book of poems but a bird

I’ll overcome this existence

Finally I’ll be free of it

Bird-flies-out-of-water-shaking-its-wings poetry book

Now scribbles of Time’s footsteps appear in the book

Scribbles left by skinny bird legs

made with the world’s heaviest pencil

Perhaps there’s a will left in the scribbles

This book is about the realization of

I-thought-bird-was-part-of-me-but-I-was-part-of-bird sequence

It’s a delayed record of such a sequence13

The promise of being freed from the book and

being able to step off the paper-thin railing

if I write everything down

It’s the delayed record of my regret

14

Going Going Gone

Bird cuts me out

like the way sunlight cuts out shadows

Hole enters

the spot where I was cut out

I exit

Bird cuts me out

like the way time cuts me

Gaping mouth enters

the cutout

I exit through the open mouth

then return as a deformed child

I exit again

I take a step toward where I don’t exist

I take a step toward where I don’t exist

Bird doesn’t cut me out

Behind the wall I’m on standby forever

15

Double S Double S

Ssity doesn’t want to know—your mind

Ssity doesn’t want to know—your ssorrow

Ssity doesn’t want to know anything

yet it offers me sseveral numbers

I’ll no longer take up any sspace in this ssity

I’ll no longer eat anything

I’ll pick a clam with my lips as if I had a beak

ssmudge fish blood onto my face and

grab the wrists of the wind in two equal sstrands

I’ll laugh

I’ll evaporate

I’ll retire

I’ll sstay inconspicuous

How long have I walked? When I chewchew the arcade—ice cream sshop, bakery, bookstore, noodle sshop—

it feels as if the sscorching ssandy beach is about to pour out from my throat

I’ll now become a long trail of birds

I’ll sswaddle the ssity

then the flock of birds will sspeak

(Next, please draw lines to match ssimilar words)16

Sstreets make the cars ssit up

then ssuspend them up in the air and

the flock of birds sslides down to the river

When the bird embroiders the dark ssea with a golden thread then

ssnatches up the ssea in its beak, ssoars up, and lets go of it

the ssea currents will sswell over the ssity

Sseawater will leak from between the lines of my notebook

Birds have double s dangling from the bottom of their feet

(Bird on the railing of the bridge of Han River

Future on its left foot

Past on its right foot

Less, ness, less, ness, less, ness

Bird waddles by sswaying its butt

and ss pile up in my diary)

(In the ssity center, I ssuddenly feel the world is sso ssmall; I become claustrophobic)

Therefore, I draw a line across my notebook17

sscribbling

away

Bird never sspeaks to anyone first

Of course, I’m the ssame way

My face will grow feathers

I’ll fly away

18

Phantom Pain Wings

Bird in high heels

walks on asphalt, crying

Mascara drips down

My night feathers are infinitely, infinitely large

Critics tell me,

Condolences are for us

You’re too filthy for them

I keep dreaming the same dream

It has the face of a human but

is a bird when it stretches out its limbs

I told you not to cut me off

I keep dreaming the same dream

Inside my bone

bird’s transparent pathway

Behind my sunglasses

two black beans on a silver platter

(Can you read dreams with those two beans?)

I can’t take any calls at the moment because I’m having a meal

I eat as I walk

I lift my head as I walk

I shit blood as I walk

Its name? Bird

That bird with glass stuck to its abdomen

Bird is chased by wind

Maybe it has sand feathers?19

Homeless bird

its tiny shoulders

Bird sticks to glass then vanishes

To be honest, I walk because my armpits flutter

I walk because I’m ashamed of my huge wings

I walk because my bird house is smaller than me

When it rains my soaked hands are infinitely, infinitely large

Bird was on its way to die, to hide

The second it turns around to look at me

it chirps, This is Seoul!

There’s no place for me to hide here!

Please push me off the cliff!

Bird swirls in the air like a lonely gaze

Critics say,

Safety can’t be guaranteed

We’ll hit you when you come in

Bird replies, Please stop talking about me!

Bird is up in the air

after being flung onto the ground

Honestly, this isn’t the sound of rain

It’s the sound of my high heels pounding the asphalt

Tonight, there’s no place for me

to hide except in this bathroom

I’m calmed by the sound of

water streaming from the faucet

I mourn in here20

My hand trembles

as I curl up my eyelashes with mascara as if lifting up my black wings

The sound of rain hitting the tiles pushes me off the deep end

Tonight, there’s no place for me to put down my poem

21

Bird’s Repetition

All the stories bird tells perched on the treetop are about me

Nothing about the rumors of my lies, my thefts and such but

something ordinary like how I was born and died

Bird talks only about me even when I tell it to stop or change the topic

It’s always the same story like the sound of the high heels of the woman, walking around in the same pair all her life

This is why I have a bird that I want to break

Like a poet who buys a ream of A4 paper

and crumples the sheets one by one and tosses them

I have a bird I want to break

When I crumple up my poems that are like

the family members inside a mirror in front of me

I can hear the stories of fluttering birds

“You were born and died”

Then I say, You scissormouths

and go buy a paper shredder

to shred every poetry book of mine

But later, when I opened up the shredder

a flock of birds was sitting inside, talking about me as if reading line by line

Moreover, each bird had a different face

and the hens talked about me even while sitting on their eggs

They didn’t care to fly off

Instead, they clustered under the peanut tree and talked about me

like peanuts under the ground

So, I said to them, enough of telling the same old story of how I was born and died

How about something else?

For instance, how about the fact that I always wear the same high heels

to work and back

but when I’m under the same tree at the same park

I always dance a waltz

And do several movements of embracing the moon

But they replied,22

You were born inside bird

Not opposite of that

You died inside bird

Not opposite of that

You were born and died

23

Smell of Wings

The therapist says

Picture a bird in your mind

What kind of bird is it?

It’s small and white

It’s weightless and colorless, it seeps in and out of its white surroundings

It’s lonely when it flies and anxious when it walks

I need to protect it but

I need to protect it yet

(The mumblings of a rescuer)

It has pink armpits

Milky white bird doesn’t necessarily cry milky milky milky

They’re all lies, really

White bird who just chirped in front of me like a white handkerchief

is bird that politely sips tea

When I scold it, bird says that it couldn’t help itself

because of the attacks against me, the questions about my accountability for my insanity, my violent language

Actually, I take up a lot of space

I’m about to become the grave of white bird

Every time bird says it couldn’t help itself

I want to fly high up

but I get short of breath because my chest is too big

I feel as if I’ll knock someone down when I spread my wings

So to be honest, I’ve never once spread my wings

Ah, ah, my wings are so big that I’m bird that can never be born

My wings smell like my womb’s spit

stench of stinky bird24

Behind me (What are you doing?)

the therapist says

Now place the bird inside your breast and hug it

Next day

the therapist says

Picture a bird in your mind

What kind of bird is it?

I’m bird that can be born anywhere

I can even be born through a sweat pore

No matter how transparent a bird, it’s embarrassed when its body’s too big

so mayflies are probably the least embarrassed among those that fly

Behind me (What are you thinking?)

the therapist says

Now hug the mayfly

25

Glimmer—You Must

Birds I seeded inside your body feel all lumpy—you must

Your blood is replaced with bird’s blood—you must

Every day, your footsteps stompstomp up in the air

Every day, idiotic, stupid you can’t find the door to your own body

You who wants to become me became frantic to leave your body—you must

It’s a muggy summer, but the ground below feels endlessly distant like autumn

Like the way your throat is parched from thirst

your body’s birds combust—you must

Puffs of smoke leak from your lips

and birds that want to perch on my body become hot hot hotter by the day

Bam bam inside your heart’s nest

a single beat for each hatchling

The day I glimpse howling birds outside the windows of your lukewarm eyes

The day wings quickly sprout, but they’re inside the rock

Like your mommy, your right hand 26

gently pushes down on your chest filled with birds

You do that to me every day in same position

Birds inside you glimmer—you must

27

Bird Stood as a Question Mark

After I returned home and opened the door

it felt as if the walls took a few steps, then flew up

My room is covered in Post-its

I lie on the floor and imagine a yellow house

Each child sticks its head out from

each picture-frame-like window

One Post-it flickers

and wind that enters can’t exit

Today, a pen stuck in my throat made a sound like a bird crying

Roofs covered in black hair flapped about the windows

Why do I stick all of my feathers onto the roofs instead of letting them fall to the ground?

Why do my eggs crack and featherless chicks pop out from them?

Why do you throw the cat you befriended into the river and go on your vacation?

If you’re so ashamed, why don’t you just croak, instead of plucking your bloody feathers?

The children’s choir sings loudly

and takes a breath, holding it in forever

A giant takes off his dark-blue coat

to cover the children, pushing their heads down

I can still feel the heavy coat in my hands

In my room, I can hear the Post-it stuck on the door of the freezer breathing 28

I speak inside the room covered in yellow Post-its

Over there the day is so long that

in a blink of an eye

over here is already gone

What should I do after I finish plucking all my feathers?

In my room, question marks line up like waterfowl

In my room, the walls bob up and down

like waves in an endless trance

In my room, newly hatched birds riding the currents

stroke their yellow feathers one by one with their beaks

29

Floor Is Not a Floor

Sparkly silver chains on my ankles

As soon as Mommy hatched, she dressed me in a birdcage

My feet keep sinking into the trampoline night

Like a white aurora the rabbit-shaped shadow dissipates

I bounce into the trampoline night

Whowhenwhyhowwherewhat—

I bounce up facing the inexplicable face

The shiny moonlight on my silver chains

gave birth to Mommy, raised and married her off

then made her have me, and now

turns her into a sick bedridden granny

I stretch my hands out to the moon,

Come out! Come out! I’m going to slap your face

I leave Mommy in hospice and I dance a trampoline dance

I don’t go to see Mommy, instead I dance, fighting the moon

My dance slays as I dance

My dance makes loud thumping sounds

Trampoline night

Trampoline mountain

Trampoline forest

Sink-sink-into-the-rabbit-shadow-swamp night

I’ll fight them

I’ll slay them

I’ll seduce the mountain

Look here, drink this

summer’s monsoon juice

End-of-heatwave-typhoon slush30

I’ll offer it to the forest

Look here, drink this

Cool-autumn-rain-mixed-fruit nectar

to seduce the giant who lives in the forest

I want to slay the space between sky and land

I want to slay everyplace except where Mommy is lying

I want to slay the rain falling like a black velvet curtain