“To Return Language to Sound”

notes on & prompts from Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi

Thanks to everyone who took part in last week’s CRAFT x Mirror Nation session!

Below are some more prompts that I came up with in addition to the ones we did together. There’s still time to sign up for this and next month’s CRAFT sessions! I just finished November’s book, Babel-17, which among many things, is about a spaceship captain who is also a poet and a linguist (it’s also a relatively short, fast-paced read), and I’ve been thinking about the role of poetry in the book and am already looking forward to hearing other people’s thoughts.

On to the Mirror Nation notes and prompts!

There is one word that comes to mind when I think of Mirror Nation, Don Mee Choi’s final installment in the KOR-US trilogy1: Recursion. A word that is itself recursive.

What I mean in using the word recursion is that Choi continues her engagement with many of the symbols—to name some: wings, angels, and of course, mirrors—that appear in the first two books of the trilogy, as well as the pamphlet Translation Is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode2. But in Mirror Nation, such symbols become affixed to another set of events, memories, and histories, namely those of the (American-supported) Gwangju Uprising3. Reading Mirror Nation is like holding a stone in your hand and turning it over to each time notice another of its faces, a different detail.

What I also mean is that recursion always intimates return. And return, the possibility of it, feels central to Choi’s praxis as an artist and writer.

I was listening to a conversation between Choi and Srikanth Reddy4 when I discovered that the previous title for Mirror Nation had been “Wings of Utopia.” I’m curious how Choi ended up at this title, both for the book and its title poem/piece. Whatever the reason, the title Mirror Nation is, to me, the book’s centerpiece and synthesis. When Paek Un-Seon scratched the Japanese flag off in a photo of Korean Olympian Sohn Kee-chung to produce a new image, he returned the photograph to itself. He captured something more true, visbilizing an absence.

I read Choi’s work and ask these questions:

  • What returns me to myself? What am I being returned from?
  • How can I orient my thinking to return toward the future rather than the past? Put another way, how can I imagine a future beyond what currently exists?
  • What political structures would make it possible for me to return, not just to the country where I was born, but to the life I could have lived there?

Craft Exercises

Prompt 1#: Zooming in and Out Like a Camera

In this excerpt from “Ode S,” there is a photo of schoolchildren who are locked arm-in-arm in protest during the Gwangju Uprising, and in this photo one face stands out. At the bottom-center of the photograph, is the bright face of a girl, the features of expression explicated by direct sunlight: brows slightly drawn, making the muscles of her forehead slightly visible, and mouth open.

But I am immediately drawn to the face of this girl among the crowd of children not just because of the she stands out in the photographs’s contrast but because her face is familiar. Earlier in Mirror Nation, we encounter the poem “Chorus of O,” which introduces us to the girl’s face in close-up, set amongst the faces of others whose mouths hang open.

This move of introducing both a person and a moment in close detail and then zooming out to show the the whole photograph reminds me that history contains a multiplicity of lives. Choi focuses on one face but then reveals that this face makes up a number of faces in a crowd of protestors.

  • Write a paragraph with a singular voice, image, or character.
  • Then, write another paragraph that zooms out and expands beyond what is singular. Some questions to potentially address: Whose voices join? What images surround the image at the center? What characters are in the “crowd” with this character?

Prompt #2: Notes for Returning

Something that struck me in Mirror Nation was how poetic the notes were at the end of the book. I’m thinking, for example, of the line “Grief tells me to live” in Choi’s note for the poem “What else can grief see?” Making my way through the collection’s poems, many upon first read were not immediately legible to me (meaning that personal and historical contexts with which I’m familiar didn’t shed much light on these poems). Arriving at the notes and the context they offer completely transforms my memory of what I’d read and guides me to return to book’s poems with this new knowledge that is not just made up of historical fact but also of lyric gesture.

  • Return to a piece you’re revising. What would be in the end notes of this piece? What would happen if you utilized a set of notes as Choi does to describe the circumstances around what occurs in the piece itself?
  • Use these notes to share new details that route the reader back to the piece

Prompt #3: Rethinking the Bridge

While in conversation with Don Mee Choi about Mirror Nation, Srikanth Reddy comments on how the book re-shaped the way he thought of bridges: “We’re kind of instructed to think of bridges as something that unites people across divisions or borders. But your poem makes me recognize that bridges are also military targets and can be scenes of destruction and loss of life, or of very complex negotiations, like a spy swap, right? Where the bridge is kind of like a demilitarized zone where two different cultures or politics can enter into negotiations.”

  • Choose a symbol or image from a piece and consider how you can likewise transform the author’s view of it. How can you hold the symbol/image from another angle to see another side of it?
  • Alternatively: Choose 2 people/ideas/subjects and imagine they meet on the kind of bridge described by Choi and Reddy. What is negotiated? What do they say to each other before they walk away?

*Radical Experiment*: A Technique to Return Language to Sound

In Anabelle Johnston’s review of Mirror Nation,5 Johnston describes Choi’s use of alliteration as “a technique to return language to sound.” I love the idea of this, and it makes me think of how repetition is also used in this way in the poem “Swan Soliloquoy.”

  • Choose two nouns that appear in Mirror Nation.
    Begin with one of the nouns and utlize repetition in writing until that word dissolves into/becomes your other noun.
  • Bonus: Allow your first noun transform into a different word than the other noun you chose. Write a paragraph about the relationship between the three words.
  1. My understanding is that KOR-US refers to Korea-US while echoing both the abbreviation (of the same spelling) for the U.S.-Korea Free Trade agreement and the pronunciation of the word chorus). The KOR-US trilogy is made up Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation.
  2. I have read Hardly War and DMZ Colony but not in a few years. Reading Translation Is a Mode=Translation Is an Anti-neocolonial Mode alongside Mirror Nation was instrumental for me to understand the book. A free PDF of the pamphlet can be found here
  3. U.S. Role in Kwangju and Beyond by Donald N. Clark
  4. Srikanth Reddy in Conversation with Don Mee Choi
  5. Violence Repeated: On Don Mee Choi’s “Mirror Nation” by Anabelle Johnston