77 Love Sonnets Book

So I was shocked by how much I actually liked Dura, given that it's part of the "read experimental poetry to find out why I like some of it and not others" and it's featured in the same book as SPACE and Writing Is an Aid to Memory, neither of which I liked, but I was happily surprised by how beautiful and, yes, interpretable, Dura was.

It did display many of the same disjunctive patterns as those other books, but it gave many more footholds, like in this section of "Chart",Purpose lost

Sure belief lost

Ritual feign

Hostile warrant

Burning stylus

Manacle pole

Dispel embrace

Native place where there is no grammatical linkage between sections, but there's a feeling that all these fragments would go together to describe the same event/circumstance. Conversely, in "Thirty and Five Books" we get "Never having been here when the sun rose. // Flowering amid which deer. The suggestion of deer. // Adjustments of liar liar. Having arrived here," where the different parts don't seem at first to have much to do with each other logically, but their is plenty of grammatical coherence and each individual thing makes enough sense to give me something to hang on to while I try to connect them to one another.

Dura circled around the topics of language (perhaps unsurprisingly) especially writing and publication and the formal context of places like school, immigration and feeling like an Other, critiques of capitalism and colonialism. The poems are often formally cutting--like the beginning of "Hummingbird" which is a quiz, one to be a little afraid of if you are arriving in a place new. In other places the commentary was more overt. Probably the most obviously critical poem was "Thirty and Five Books" which includes passages like "Population gathered to population. More uninhabited space in America than elsewhere. Is that accurate. Riders wielding tall sticks with strips of white linen attached to them. Is that accurate" or "Bodies in propulsion. Guatemalan, Korean, African-American sixteen year olds working check-out lanes. Hard and noisy enunciation." The other poems all had these sort of feelings within them, but not always as easily accessible as they often were in "Thirty and Five Books," which was also the longest portion of the book.

I do not pretend to fully understand this book, but I definitely felt like I got much more out of it than out of some of the other pieces I've read recently and I think (if it weren't an interlibrary loan) spending an extended time rereading and thinking about it would be a worthwhile endeavor--which I didn't feel with books like SPACE. This edition has a preface and an afterword and I actually might see if I can get ahold of some of the criticism cited, since I think reading about this book could be really productive and enjoyable because the collection gave me something to hold on to.

A final question--the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was mentioned as an influence on Kim's work. Is their something shared in Asian-American experimental poetry communities that did not make its way to white experimental poets working at around the same time that makes me like Kim's work (and the little I have read by Cha, or The Bees Make Money in the Lion by Lo Kwa Mei-en) but not some of these other books?