New Languages, New Music

Rosanna Young Oh reviews Jimin Seo’s "OSSIA."

By Rosanna Young OhSeptember 1, 2024

• Poetry

• Cultural Studies

IN MUSIC, the term “ossia” refers to an alternative passage played instead of the original. In Jimin Seo’s new debut poetry collection, winner of the Changes Book Prize judged by the late Louise Glück, the title reveals the book’s chief artistic virtues: formal originality and musicality. These qualities owe a debt to the Objectivists, who prioritized poetic structure, and play off Seo’s sensibility as a trained pianist. Each poem operates like an individual measure that builds and responds to another, in different variations and across multiple languages, to create strange, intelligent music about art-making and loss.

To read OSSIA primarily for meaning would do it a disservice. One might best read the book as a performance of language rather than as a lyrical project. A beacon here is poet Louis Zukofsky, who first defined “sincerity” and “objectification” as two essential criteria for Objectivism in his essay “Sincerity and Objectification: With Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff.” Objectivist poetry, according to Zukofsky, documents and investigates to achieve a language that most closely captures reality, and to present a truthful and concrete view. He writes: “Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.” Rather than serving as a prism of the poet’s subjective experience, Objectivist poetry requires clarity, directness, and a focus on the external world.

As it was for the Objectivists, “sincerity” for Seo is more than a retelling of personal narrative. In fact, he doesn’t seem to care about being literally understood, as the speaker in the first poem, “Pastoral,” suggests:

You want me to tell you something about my life.
That I was carried to pay off a debt, two hundred
steps up an unremarkable hill my mother in 서울
defeated with the strength of a beggar’s bowl,
no breastplate, a generous horse, a king-blessed épée.

Here, sonic texture language is more interesting than the speaker’s story, which seems to be an immigrant narrative centered on a mother. The logic of the imagery simultaneously defamiliarizes and sets up foundational metaphors around family and kingdom that the speaker complicates and expands on later. The final stanza is a direct address:

Reader, I’ve sold you my story. I am what you think
wrongly, half-beast, half-boy, too weak to carry
your pastoral flag, your mule-ride, cash strapped
belly-side. You ride and whip me into starlight. Rightly,
no time is enough time 잡아도 잡아도 지나가는 시간.

Defiance operates as the engine of these poems, the tonal equivalent of a raised middle finger, as though the poet wants to free himself of any readerly expectations by giving the audience a proverbial bone: his autobiographical “story.” Elsewhere, this impulse to provoke intensifies into rage: “깨어나라 깨어나라 엿먹어라,” which translates to “Wake up, wake up, fuck you.” The language itself is “half-beast” and half-human, dwelling in the reality of human suffering as well as another imagined universe that allures.

It is the intimacy of Seo’s voice that drives the series of conversations between the speaker and his resurrected lovers and beloveds: most notably, the translator-poet Richard Howard—who was Seo’s mentor and friend—and a lost mother. The collection alternates between “Richard” poems and a series of poems that are all titled “OSSIA.” Poem after poem unspools with relentless questioning, like a Hamlet soliloquy, while also moving with musical momentum. The following lines from a section in the book’s sonnet crown, titled “Crown for Peasant Heads,” showcases Seo’s formal technique:

Ai ai ai you seemed to say with no choice.
On a different day, I lay with a man
and said ah not caring if the song was man
on the moon or earth, wind, and fire. Your voice
at the end of the call said there is no noise
where two men live only two men can
die. I wish I knew then what angel you meant,
flying on a crushed wing, circling, circling
as I lay with Gabriel and said ah.

The internal rhymes, achieved by “say,” “day,” and “lay” as well as the repetition of “man” and “men,” quicken the poem’s pace as they set off a largely monosyllabic cadence that mimics the “circling, circling” in the penultimate line. “Ai ai ai” is a clever choice, for it is an expression of grief in multiple languages. The homophone “ah” resonates here as pleasure in English and elsewhere as a lament in Korean. (For example, the following sonnet begins: “Grappling his better angel, 아 아 아 / she’s dead.”)

The Richard poems, such as “Richard and the Book Buyers” and “Richard Remembers Gide,” operate like a fugue, polyphonic and contrapuntal. Korean, English, and French play off one another, images repeat, and questions are asked and answered:

Richard, I carry your immortal head on a platter and I am
immoral. Grief gives me pockets and I jam a wish through
none of which comes true. […]

You sing on the counter behind a closed door
les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir.

노래가 이거 아니면 뭘까

Throughout the collection, some lines reappear in alternate forms: the English translation of the above Korean appears as “What is song but that” and the French as “sounds and perfumes swirl in the night air.” The image of a severed body on a platter, with the speaker calling himself immoral, reappears in Korean elsewhere:

반신의 대갈통을 쟁반에 들고 오는 부도덕한 나
슬픔이 만든 주머니에 소망을 쑤셔 넣어도
내가 원하는 것은 비망이다

The fugal composition of these poems requires that they be read together, as each poem acts as an individual melody in harmony with the rest. The innovations are formally exacting, beyond logic or meaning.

As in the poetry of other Korean American poets, such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Don Mee Choi, the originality of Seo’s poetry arises from its collage of linguistic surfaces and textures. The speaker takes on the persona of a philosopher who meditates on existential questions and the purpose of art. Throughout these poems, the speaker translates, retranslates, loses languages, and finds new ones. In “Richard Translates,” Seo writes, “Richard, I have lost my language more times than I / can count.” Later in the same series, the speaker asks, “Isn’t learning a new language just a new way / of saying the world we live in isn’t enough?”

What is, then, the meaning of all this language-play, of all this music? It is a question that the speaker himself asks repeatedly throughout the Richard poems as an intellectual exercise. But for me, at the heart of OSSIA is a son’s grief for his mother. In one poem, she asks her son why he has resurrected her through poetry: “시로 내 몸을 짓는 아들아, 왜 또 나를 이 땅에서 지어 올리니? 외국의 여신으로 만드니 / 마음이 덜 불행하냐?” Roughly translated: “Son who creates my body through poems, why do you resurrect me? Does making me a foreign goddess make you less unhappy?” Though not explicit, the portrait of her life these poems paint suggests it was a difficult one that involved unfathomable humiliations and a cruel husband. Like a king, the husband “takes his chair” to “slice […] the choicest / cut” of meat and considers his marriage a transaction: “My wife gives / children I wanted / and dies.” A series of poems in the third to last section offers a mythic retelling of a first wife who was used, abused, and then forgotten:

In his 64th year, the lands increase
two-fold, he throws his wife
into the river and her ashes dust
his home’s increase. He marries
twice, carries out the sale of the land,
the sale of his first wife

I think, in particular, of immigrant women of a certain generation. I think of arguments with customers, chapped hands that smell like metal after a day of handling coins and grimy dollar bills. I think of a woman working herself to numbness, prioritizing her husband and children before herself. How great their sacrifices; how small they were made to feel.

The final poem, “Translator’s Preface,” exemplifies Seo’s language project:

memory / migrate
translate / memory
My loves rot like scrap
-loaded ants turning in

to a peephole: may I be understood like this: There there as a comfort
I’ve never heard of but there, there a space point specifically to wander

Here, Seo highlights the porosity of language. Language is a material concrete enough to have a “peephole” through which another world is accessed. The poet’s self exists in a liminal “space point,” between the binaries of “memory” and “migrate,” between “translate” and “memory.” If translation is a form of documenting reality in another language, then it, too, is a version of ossia:

SEO

JI
자
MIN
자
올림
let me raise our name

By translating and riffing on his poems in multiple languages, Seo writes multiple selves onto the page. Here, understanding each word’s meaning is not as important as following a fluent mind that weaves Korean, English, and French together to create a new language.