Jimin Seo
In the latest issue of PN Review, I have a review of the (I admit, kind of hot) poet Jimin Seo’s new book, OSSIA, exploring how he stages his relationship with his teacher, Richard Howard. I am polite but I did not like it. I paste the review below and then some of Seo’s poems on the subject so you can see for yourself—and notice, reader, how I am making an effort to be nice!
Jimin Seo, OSSIA
Changes Press $18.99
By Blake Smith
‘My friend, another giant of the world sleeps/ for good,’ Jimin Seo writes of his teacher, Richard Howard (1929-2022), in one of OSSIA’s fifteen poems on and to the recently deceased poet and translator. Seo’s poems to Howard recall what has been since the 1970s a tradition in gay American poetry of writing poems to Howard in the latter’s signature epistolary style, inaugurated by students and friends like Rudy Kikel and Paul Monette, following Howard’s own famous address to Hart Crane, ‘Decades’ (1976). Placing himself in this lineage, Seo imitates Howard’s playful urbanity in a number of touching poems (e.g. ‘Richard Asks to Sort Books Together’), which, like their forebears, also allow him to stage his proximity to a great man of letters. He does so sometimes with the embarrassing familiarity of a groupie, sometimes with tough pathos, as in his evocations of Howard’s final years (‘Do I explain my doddering,/ pocked as my brain is by the friction of casting/ after my own name?’).
Seo also takes up Howard’s concern for translation, although here in a mode more informed by an un-Howardian poetics of dispersal and opacity. Poems in Korean, about and in the voice of the poet’s mother (‘My son, who builds my body with poetry, are you less unhappy when you turn me into a foreign goddess?), alternate with the poems in English where Howard appears as a ghostly queer father (‘by a sidelong grammar of paternity,’ as Howard said of and to Crane). These poems, some of which have counterparts in English, deal with suffering, poverty, animality—as if, reviving the most classic gestures of French feminism from half a century ago, the language of the mother was the abject obverse of paternal language’s ordered rationality.
Likewise, black pages with white text, written in Korean, running vertically, appear as commentary on, or breaks within, the other cycles of poems (the addresses to Howard, the final sonnet chain), or perhaps Brechtian captions announcing, ‘The Man Who Cheats,’ or ‘A Commie’s Letter of Promise.’ The fragmentation of perspective, and the running non-dialogue between the Korean-motherly and English-fatherly strands, offers a provocative contrast to Howard’s own techniques of ventriloquizing historical figures (often chosen ancestors) through elliptical and digressive narrative poems that close with a sense of achieved unity. Seo risks, however, falling at times into the bathos of an Ocean Vuong dealing with similar themes (‘You should bury your mother under your feet, too’).
Which is not to say Seo is without humor; he is indeed in this respect a student of Howard, whose penchant for punning, in English and across other languages, was at times a bit much (recall the line in which Howard translated Baudelaire’s mille souvenirs as ‘souvenirs, I’ve got a million!’). Seo gives us, in a jokingly pseudo-erudite excursion into philology, ‘spells to inevitably spook/ cor into corpse, to only know a book/ is curse, cur, or cure,’ approaching the frothy excess that is the trademark of another of Howard’s former protégés, Wayne Koestenbaum, with whom Seo shares an operatic vocabulary (‘ossia’ is a musical term meaning ‘alternatively’), and a powerful range.
***
RICHARD WAKES UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
My friend, no one tells you your mortal enemy
is yourself, waking up to the middle distance
between the marriage bed and the fridge, lamp
lit to a soft red glow so I can ford any river, pass
the brain fog and the forest of my subconscious,
slip two silvers to the bridge troll to walk back
into the palace of my lover sound asleep.
Why his pillow is the scent of my loss, and the quiet
rustle of bedding, dread, I sit softly at my desk
and hope light breaks sooner so I am less lonely.
Why do we wake up in the middle of the night
when no one wants it to happen? What friends
will take my calls when there is nobody home
to hear my incessant ringing. Who can pick up?
Richard, out of doors with drums and pipes,
nothing is as it seems. The car blare,
musette, the night’s music
just beginning
to crash
into light. What’s there to chase into myself but myself?
***
RICHARD TRANSLATES
Richard, I have lost my language more times than I can count.
A deer comes herding past my bedtime
and tears the least fragrant buds from my garden.
If only all terrible things happen in our sleep when
nearest to death or birth before the canal of dreams
winks and the biology of wakefulness tells me
revive! revive! and I walk into the manicured lawn and all heads
are lopped clean and carried off in the acid sack of a thief,
the remainder the vibrant lush of slender leaves and sorrow,
what is the name of the giant you’ve become in the language I gave up,
the remnant sap rimming my mouth I shout.
My friend, another giant of the world sleeps
for good. I’m asked to tug his tongue loose
a second time to revive him in a language
his own mother thought, hardly vital. As if
I could match that colossal trial between
maman and la petite bête. Latch him to a new
country. Wet my fingers in his mouth.
Drag his spittle up my throat, the unhinged
mandible, the soft plush of my own lukewarm
innards knowing my penning cuts him even
after his death. So why is it like leaving
a room after a disappointing night of sex,
my native tongue a sore point revised
as the last country he can never find relief.
Isn’t learning a new language just a new way
of saying the world we live in isn’t enough?
So why pry this giant’s mouth open and
force my spit into his? Will his final rasp
burst in the air so I can convince the world
I was never good enough to bet his life on?
***
Ew—it’s all a bit much, Anxiety-of-Influence in a particularly histrionic and unerotically over-sexed mode. And I think it’s quite unseemly to stage your teacher in the confusions and sufferings of Alzheimer’s.
But I was recently reading Howard’s own first book of poems, Quantities (1962) and it’s also pretty bad, with all of the faults his later work (annoying humor, Europhile pretension, cryptic silliness—vices of Auden, Stevens, Merrill and Ashbery) would stay with, but little (it seems to me) of the future strengths and successes. Although there is, at least, a wide variety of forms, the promise that this is a poet who has range (I have no idea what one is supposed to show in a first book of poems to be esteemed a promising young-ish poet—whether coherence and depth in exploring a theme/style or rather hopeful shoots coming out in all directions—or how much what the book reads like even matters; its reception/reputation perhaps having already been determined in advance) I wouldn’t, at the time, have read it with much anticipation about this person’s career. (Am I missing something, too, in my lack of excitement for Everybody’s Substack Novel or E-Girl Poetics? But I can’t even get excited about deflating such things).
Quantities is also pretty gay, for the time, given that Howard was a decade and a half a way from being publicly out. It has a love poem to his then-partner Sanford Friedman (author of the terrible but nevertheless NYRB-Classics-ified gay novel of the 60s, Totempole) and a number of embarrassing sex scenes:
It’s reassuring that people are overcoming their bad early work (although how are they doing it? Books and opinions about ‘late style’, but who explains how anyone over-and-be-comes himself?)—and that ‘early’ can mean one’s 30s and even 40s (How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher?)—which means there’s hope for Jimin Seo, hope maybe for me, and who knows, for you too?
But where in unsuitable heaven
Can he get the heat that will make him grow?
For he needs something or will forever remain a dwarf,
Though a perfect one, and possessing a normal-sized brain
But he has got to be released by giants from things…
Meanwhile what I am going to do?
I am growing up again, in school, the crisis will be very soon.
And you twist the darkness in your fingers, you
Who are slightly older . . .