Refrains of memory: poetics of loss and the Korean diaspora

2014-08-06My dissertation Refrains of Memory: Poetics of Loss and the Korean Diaspora consists of two major components: 1) a critical section comprised of four scholarly essays, and 2) a creative section that includes a full-length collection of poetry. Intended to be published as article-length essays, the critical section is organized around the representations of loss and cultural trauma in Korean-American diasporic texts. Reflecting similar concerns, my poetry book Magnetic Refrain is a collection of formal and lyrical verse that explores overshadowed Korean myths and diasporic voices, and is forthcoming publication from Kaya Press in fall of 2012. ❧ The critical part of the dissertation is a collection of chapters that analyze Korean modernity across the different genres of poetry, fiction, and documentary. In particular, my project looks at how individual and collective traumas in Korean modern history, particularly from Japanese colonization and the Korean civil war, are represented differently by popular and lesser-known Korean-American artists that range from the novelist Chang-rae Lee to Language poet Cathy Park Hong. In the last chapter, an autocritical reflection on how being a Korean adoptee and a writer are entwined, the tone is informed by a curiosity and a skepticism to recover a lost personal history by returning to unofficial, collective histories and other forms of story-telling that complicate the veracity of memory. ❧ In my poetic work, I am focused on infusing aspects of history and myth with the personal and experiential. Largely framed around exploring the silenced voices of the Korean American diaspora, my poems in Magnetic Refrain speak to the difficulties of representing a singular, “authentic” experience of militarized comfort women, war brides, North Korean refugees, and Korean birthmothers and adoptees. Drawing on both historical events and popular culture to approach the subject of trauma as nuanced, overall my aesthetic plays with the notion of the contradictory: to refrain as in to sing, and to refrain as in to withhold from or be restrained from singing. From playful Korean folktales to rewritten fairytales to lyrical prose poems, my intention is to bring the personal, political, and historical into play with another, and delightfully in tension