Working On Gallery
Vol. 6 - No.8
Guest Writer: Rosanna Young Oh
Introduction: Naoko Fujimoto
Guest Writer: Rosanna Young Oh
Introduction: Naoko Fujimoto
No longer “stone,” no longer “hiding,” the veteran becomes a “window,” as he faces his memories and the violence of history, in which he is both a participant and survivor.
- Rosanna Young Oh
I often experience coincidental moments of creativeness.
On Monday, a friend mentioned a particular point about something, then on Friday, I had a sort of epiphany, or conclusion to it. It is a strange feeling, but I love this sort of coincidence.
Leslie Sainz said, "I do believe that poems are destabilizing, indiscernible forces. To create emotional and psychological aftershocks in the reader—weeks, months, maybe even years after they’ve engaged with your work—is proof that you’ve done your job as an artist" in the newest issue of RHINO Interviews. She shared the creative process of her newest book, Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023), explaining her political themed poems. I received her article on Monday, and then, Rosanna Young Oh sent me the following essay on Friday.
The 2024 United States presidential election will be held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.
Despises America's choice, we - - all over the world - - will face a new normal of modern history. I would like you ask, borrowing words from Rosanna Young Oh, "...poetry can enable conversations with the self, community, and history at a time when myriad forces encourage polarization and disconnection."
I feel privileged to speak about these two inspirational writers, Leslie Sainz and Rosanna Young Oh. We have records and poems about war victims and political refugees. Have we forgotten about our own shared history?
On Monday, a friend mentioned a particular point about something, then on Friday, I had a sort of epiphany, or conclusion to it. It is a strange feeling, but I love this sort of coincidence.
Leslie Sainz said, "I do believe that poems are destabilizing, indiscernible forces. To create emotional and psychological aftershocks in the reader—weeks, months, maybe even years after they’ve engaged with your work—is proof that you’ve done your job as an artist" in the newest issue of RHINO Interviews. She shared the creative process of her newest book, Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023), explaining her political themed poems. I received her article on Monday, and then, Rosanna Young Oh sent me the following essay on Friday.
The 2024 United States presidential election will be held on Tuesday, November 5, 2024.
Despises America's choice, we - - all over the world - - will face a new normal of modern history. I would like you ask, borrowing words from Rosanna Young Oh, "...poetry can enable conversations with the self, community, and history at a time when myriad forces encourage polarization and disconnection."
I feel privileged to speak about these two inspirational writers, Leslie Sainz and Rosanna Young Oh. We have records and poems about war victims and political refugees. Have we forgotten about our own shared history?
Intimate Dialogues:
On Maya Lin’s Boundaries and Yousef Komanyakaa’s ‘Facing It’
By Rosanna Young Oh
Photo: pacegallery.com
Confronting the political through the personal isn’t a new idea in poetry. But in Boundaries, the architect Maya Lin’s engagement of the artist-viewer dynamic in the context of monuments offers a lesson in how poetry can enable conversations with the self, community, and history at a time when myriad forces encourage polarization and disconnection.
Photo by Rosanna Young Oh: the City College of New York
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The book takes us behind the scenes of some of Lin’s most famous projects: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Women’s Table, and The Civil Rights Memorial, among others. Lin envisions the relationship between the artwork and audience as a participatory one, where the audience is invited to react and interpret. “Whether socially or aesthetically based, in these works I seek to create an intimate dialogue with the viewer, to allow a place of contemplation, sometimes an incorporation of history, always a reliance on time, memory, a passage or journey,” she writes.
At the City College of New York, where I teach as a visiting poet, my students considered Yusef Komanyakaa’s “Facing It” after reading Lin’s piece on the Vietnam War Memorial. As Lin recounts, the process of building the memorial was fraught with controversy. In addition to Lin’s Asian heritage, some critics questioned the monument’s apparent minimalism. (Ross Perot suggested a parade instead.) For Lin, the decision to cut into the earth represented a wound and a “scream” that evoked the war’s immeasurable losses. The names of the dead “would become the memorial; there was no need to embellish the design further,” and would encourage “everyone to respond and remember.” “Facing It” performs Lin’s intimate dialogue. The poem begins with a man’s emotional response to an unnamed thing; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is identified only almost halfway through the poem. Up to that point, the poem centers the act of contemplation itself. We don’t even know that the speaker is a veteran until later: “the booby trap’s white flash.” |
The externalization of his thoughts drives the narrative. As he walks along the memorial, reading the 58,022 names of the fallen, he recedes into himself. No longer “stone,” no longer “hiding,” the veteran becomes a “window,” as he faces his memories and the violence of history, in which he is both a participant and survivor.
Photo by Rosanna Young Oh: the City College of New York
In our class discussion, the poem’s surprising ending–the image of a woman “brushing a boy’s hair”–elicited different reactions from my students. For one reader, it signified the speaker’s own catharsis. For another, it was a statement on femininity versus masculinity. As they spoke, my brother, a Marine and Naval Academy graduate, appeared before me. I remembered my mother spending hours preparing his favorite Korean foods–oi muchim, galbi–excited to see her elder son home on leave. No displays of emotion from either of us, lest my brother interpret them as pity or guilt. I saw him reaching for both at the dinner table, this brother I had grown up with and a stranger all at once. My mother saw her son at that moment, much in the same way Eurycleia recognized Odysseus. On the page, the poem had become a monument. And I, too, was a window.
Rosanna Young Oh is the author of The Corrected Version (Diode Editions, 2023), which won the Diode Editions Book Prize and the North American Poetry Book Award judged by Lisa Russ Spaar. She is currently The Bill & Doris Lippman Visiting Poet at the City College of New York, CUNY.
October 2024
