Monica Youn, From From

 

One figure is female, the other is male.

Both are contained.

One figure is mythical, the other historical.

They occupy different millennia, different continents.

But both figures are considered Asian—one from Colchis, one from Korea.

To mention the Asianness of the figures creates a “racial marker” in the poem.

This means that the poem can no longer pass as a White poem, that different people can be expected to read the poem, that they can be expected to read the poem in different ways. (“STUDY OF TWO FIGURES (PASIPHAË / SADO”)

Dividing her time these days between New York and Irvine, California, American poet Monica Youn’s fourth full-length poetry title is From From (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2023), a collection of poems that explores identity and self, and the questions of “where are you from from” that perpetuate an othering of her Asian-Americanness. Youn crafts poems responding to how American culture keeps the very idea of her at arm’s length, attempting to corner her into an image that doesn’t exist, around an identity shaped from the outside. “In her postcolonialism // seminar,” she writes, as part of the final poem of the sequence “DERACINATIONS: EIGHT SONIGRAMS,” “she was taught to distrust / the commodification industry, // attempts to package Asianness / for Western consumption. // As an artist of color, always ask / yourself: Who is my audience? // the prof cautioned. Is this authentic / interiority? Am I self-othering?”

Following her collections Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), Ignatz (New York NY: Four Way Books, 2010) [see my review of such here] and Barter (Grey Wolf Press, 2003), From From is structured with poems that bookend five sections—“ASIA MINOR,” “DERACINATIONS,” “WETERN CIV,” “THE MAGPIES” and “IN THE PASSIVE VOICE”—wrapping parable around folk tale around cultural markers. Through shades of Ignatz, Youn writes through an explored subject for the sake of deeper commentary. “We understand these violent actions to be defensive,” she writes, as part of “STUDY OF TWO FIGURES (IGNATZ / KRAZY),” “motivated by fear—a belief / that the cherished contents of the ovals are somehow under threat. // But the ovals of the figure contain nothing. // Nothing, that is, except the blankness of the page.”

Through first-person questioning and articulations around Western canon—from Greek myth to Krazy Kat and Dr. Seuss—Youn writes contradiction, commentary, immigration and attempting to fit in. She writes of the nervousness of simply attempting to be in her own body in what at times feels akin to hostile territory, through anti-Asian attacks, ranging from outright violent to passive aggressive. “I’ve lost / my capacity for scorn: that // was my failing—not excess / of pride,” she writes, as part of the poem “MARSYAS, AFTER,” “but that stooping // to pick up their accoutrements, / as if emulation could engender // equality.” She writes the myriad threads of the magpie, offering sharp threads of seeing and articulating a through-line of references across Korean, English and American cultural references. She writes of others and othering, otherness and other tales of being. As the poem “THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A MAGPIE,” riffing off Wallace Stevens’ infamous blackbird, ends:

And the most durable slander: the magpie as thief, bling-obsessed hoarder.

All scientific evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

As if the cure for hatred could ever be knowledge, eyes lidlocked open, well irrigated, forced to see.

Youn wraps her lyric around etymologies, and how the myriad evolutions of words both articulate and shape, even twist, perspectives, writing out the biases built into the ways we speak, what we hear, and how we listen. This is articulated best through the brilliantly-evocative fifth and final section, “IN THE PASSIVE VOICE,” a lyric personal essay wrapping memoir constructed through individual, accumulating prose-sections. As the back cover offers: “If you have no core of ‘authenticity,’ no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners’ ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt.” As the prose lyric offers:

The cover of the New Yorker this week shows an Asian mother holding her daughter by the hand on the subway platform. They’re the only people visible. They’re both masked, affectless, except that the mother has her wrist raised to show her watch. But she’s not looking at her watch, she’s looking sharply to the side, the entrance, as if she’s heard something. Her daughter’s head is turned sharply in the other direction, as if she, too, has heard something. A shadow covers the top half of the image like a scrim descending.

I haven’t taken the subway since I’ve been home. Today I have to walk to a place two miles away. I could call a car service, but I refuse to spend my own money to avoid walking somewhere at 2 p.m. in my own goddamn neighborhood. But I take my pepper spray, clipped to the inside of my bag. Quick release.

About halfway there, a middle-aged Black guy falls into step beside me. “With me with you, you don’t have to worry about anything,” he says. He’s jaunty, retro-styled. He has a beautiful voice, and I’m sure he knows it. “No one will mess with you.” I roll my eyes at him, grinning under the mask.

When I get home, I check my phone. 9,741 steps.