‘Two Poems’ by Yi Won, translated by Kevin Michael Smith

These two poems by Yi Won, translated by Kevin Michael Smith, are lovely, strange, and incredibly re-readable. ‘Voices’ appears to personify a litany of things and ideas to the point of abstraction, but look again—or look differently—and the poem is a lush interior landscape, or a difficult back-and-forth between two people.

Ear,         Crawling out
Back,      The world losing
Color,     Digging up, tearing apart

Each line, each “voice,” is its own poem, its own world.

Body,      Shadow revealing its true colors
God,       Stuck to fingertips
Flower,   Vomit

I love that I can’t decide (or don’t need to) what this “is” is, that the text somehow distances itself from me, yet pulls me so close I can’t escape its violence.

‘The Window Closes in One Minute’ has a rather straightforward premise: 60 lines covering 60 seconds, but each second is stretched beyond time. It begins with an informal look:

59 Hey there, excuse me
58 Inside the body the body is rotting

But spirals outward and inward simultaneously with observations, musings, unadorned statements and lingering fragments.

7 Ripples on the Danube River is today’s last song
6 Completely draped in wind
5 Don’t stop keep flowing
4 O river water
3 Completely draped in wind

As with ‘Voices,’ ‘The Window Closes in One Minute’ demands several re-readings.

19 You cannot exit from inside the body
18 Spit your last breath
17 Where did the mouth go
16 Where is the voice
15 I am boiling up

Again, each line is its own world, and with each reading I’m left wondering where the next one will appear.

Hyperallergic