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Jimin Seo, OSSIA. Changes Press, 2024

The lyric, the lament, the sonnet, and an autobiographical speaker are popular formal choices many U.S. poets are taught to analyze, discuss, and employ through academia. Are these the salt, fat, acid, and heat of U.S. poetry? Maybe. Can new poetic possibilities be achieved with those elements? In Jimin Seo’s debut, OSSIA, they can and are.

 

This collection of poems deftly expands the above elements through syncretism, translation, and dialectics, and it reveals these expansions in interposed sections: there are the lyric title poems, OSSIA, peppered throughout that intensify and complicate; the dramatic monologues milled into dialectic elegies for Richard Howard; poems with seemingly untranslated Korean titles; and an incredible sonnet crown crescendo followed by a translator’s preface intentionally laid as the last poem. Moreover, Seo has translated the poetry within this book into Korean (or into English – depending on the reader’s cultural linguistic predilection).

 

The Italian OSSIA, or o sia, meaning “or be it” is a musical term used to indicate an alternative – often simpler form – of a musical passage in opera or piano. Basically, the musician skips a few notes on the musical notation in order to make a piece easier to play. Are these poems easier to read, write, or express in Korean or English? Admittedly, as a reader with minimal knowledge of Korean, I can’t know for sure, but I can experience the dissonance simulated in the English poems interspersed with Korean. I can also use Google translate and ChatGPT, which are very poor options for translating poetry, yet can at least demonstrate some of the enormous difficulties inherent in the transculturation of poetry.

One risk with a bilingual text is that many readers will ignore the language other than English and barrel through the text. The subtle ways in which Seo points the reader toward the translations are delightful, if a bit tricky. With some ChatGPT and Google Translate, a monolinguist can figure out the puzzle. The first poem with a solely Korean title: 깨어나라 깨어나라 엿먹어라 (25) which Google translates to “wake up, wake up, fuck you” and ChatGPT explains: 깨어나라 깨어나라 (Kkaeeonara kkaeeonara): "Wake up, wake up" – A call to awaken, often used to urge someone to become aware or alert. 엿먹어라 (Yeotmeogeora): A Korean idiom that literally means "eat yeot" (a type of traditional Korean candy), but is used colloquially to tell someone to "go to hell" or "screw you." While this non-human translation is humorous and absurd, Seo’s translation is teased to us in the last line of the poem: “Awaken, awaken, eat” (24). This is a more sensible and coherent human translation that matches the tone of the poem. Visually, he leads the reader there by presenting that line as the final line on the left page with the Korean title following on the right page in white text with black background, replicating the movement of English from left to right. This formula follows for all the poems of this type in the collection creating a sense of renewal, returning, and expansion once the reader has identified the pattern.

Another moment where Seo guides the reader into the process of translation is in the poem, “RICHARD’S EXERCISE,” presented here in its entirety:

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The way this poem is arranged on the page could be called translative typography, a sort of Rosetta Stone of intentionality for bilingual readers. For the monolinguists, this juxtaposition of Korean and English inverts subalternity, so that the English reader is left with a post-colonial deference. As a caveat, this positionality may shift for a Korean poet engaging with the work. 

 

In one of the “OSSIA” poems a rhetorical question – which is a frequent formal gesture – is offered: “What use is language when the ancients divide us into our final haunted constellations?” And then expanded upon: “Look up and see a mirror of what’s already here! How comical to read stars into accident and present into future and mean it!” (38). This intellectual dance around poetic expression is one of the book’s central interrogations. The “OSSIA” poems create a syncretic space wherein multiple identities and influences coexist within a layered and multifaceted exploration of memory, loss, and cultural identity.

 

At the same time, the dialectic elegies for Richard Howard disambiguate a hegemonic discourse of the eros inherent in mentorship. In these poems, their relationship is marked formally by the direct address that not only serves as delightful clarity but also demonstrates their status: “My friend, . . .” the voice of the mentor begins; “Richard, . . .” the voice of the mentee begins. The friction between these formal boundaries – in both academia and in the poem – catalyzes the dire emotional intensity as we watch their narrative unfold through the collection.

 

One of these poems is arranged on the page such that the “Richard . . .” part of the poem comes first, the title underneath “RICHARD ASKS TO SORT BOOKS TOGETHER” and the “My friend, . . .” part of the poem underneath that with a Korean translation on the facing page (28-29). Seo employs this shifting arrangement throughout the collection, keeping the dialectic they offer vibrant and twisting, and then from here the dialectic between these elements enlightens the subject further: “Richard, to do nothing at last is to say the world / is at war again.” and then from Richard: “Art does something at last. A counter weight” (28). This constant balancing and rebalancing of formal elements in OSSIA resonates in the text’s subject and formal expression. 

 

Some of the Richard Howard poems seem also to question how grief relates to nostalgia, while at the same time they investigate the ways in which memory is integral to the activation of that very grief: “what will my body kill to mend the well / -spring of my mind? What is forgettable?” (64). Again, the rhetorical questions provide a harrowing formal element that expresses the physical confrontation of the death of Richard Howard’s own memory as a result of Lewy-Body dementia. This book’s reanimation of voices, psyches, and interhuman experiences makes Ossia shockingly brutal in its emotional accuracy. 

 

After all this, Ossia explodes, and the political subject widens and energizes in the climactic sonnet crown. To pull quotations from it would be an injustice; the poem should be experienced in its entirety. Each part ripples with nimble musicality that spills over into an etymological linguistic ruckus while overtly addressing major themes throughout the book – and for those English monolinguists, the Korean on the facing page is a translation of the first line of each sonnet. There’s also a satisfying moment of translative typography to help close the sonnet crown.  

 

It’s rare in the U.S. to have a debut collection of poems that is immediately accessible to a non-English speaking audience. Hopefully, this book crosses the Pacific and engages with Korean readers, an appropriate homecoming for a book that, in Jimin Seo’s own words, “is an effort to give my native language currency in opposition, and in harmony, with American English. I want to look at, and have the reader look at, language as an expression of power.”

Sean F. Munro is a poet, filmmaker, Associate Professor, and Associate Editor. Sean co-curates The Splice Poetry Series, organizes the New Orleans Poetry Festival, edits for Lavender Ink / Diálogos, and manages LitWire. Publications & performances here: seanFmunro.com

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