眼勢 (OCULARFORCE)

Abstract

眼勢 (ocularforce) follows gyopo, a Korean Jewish singer, journeying with his mother to small-town South Korea after a death in the family. Composed of two long poems, AMERICAN SIJO and just azn:, the collection navigates between the edges of memory and sound, ruminating the mute violence of familial separation and its effects within a situation of diaspora. Working in conversation with Shantal Jeewon Kim’s “exclusionary poetics” and Brandon Som’s “circuity of language,” 眼勢 (ocularforce) explores how words–with their homonyms, synonyms and miscommunication– can forge connections across barriers, as well as isolate, relegate and confound. AMERICAN SIJO, which opens the collection, adapts the classical Korean song form (sijo) into a colloquial tongue riddled with Hangul, Hebrew, Hanja/Classical Mandarin, slang, romanizations and faulty translation. Whereas other English language sijo sought to preserve regular, rhythmic pace—AMERICAN SIJO both breaks with and reinforces the practice’s tradition, considering Korean music theory (specifically regarding change in tempo; beat), as well as the disregarded history of improvisational and extemporaneous sijo. just azn: is a lyric essay narrating the racialized experiences of a restaurant worker in the wake of AAPI violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. Dotted with concrete forms illustrating the confinement of imposed racial marcation, just azn: challenges the reader to gloss its incessant racial epithets—rendering illegible the speaker crying out from within the textual monolith.