What an honor to have been on Grace Cavalieri’s preeminent show where poets have a chance to highlight their work and process of writing and creating.
Author / jiwonny
Just in case you forgot just how bad he really was…
sonny stitt
sonny stitt plays now’s the time and you believe you can fly you have discovered the magic flute to propel you, to cut through the tightened seal of time and space you can transverse the complications of your diminution here what your imagination will not allow your body memory will remember that you were of wings after all riding the north wind across these hemispheres making the seasons guadalajara lima saginaw detroit come embody light by jiwon choi august 2021
Friendly Advice
how long will this go on hold my taco i have to call my mother she was expecting me for dinner but i got on this bus and we're just lingering on this street that is on fire did we go to hell?
”People in L.A. are now very aware that there’s another part of town than the West Side or the Hollywood Hills, even if it’s a part they don’t understand or are afraid of,” said Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy in Malibu. ”If there’s a positive to come out of the riots, it’s that we understand there’s a problem.”
”Now, it’s O.K.,” said Seung Choi, owner of the Korean Soup restaurant in the mall, who recalls the ”terrible, really scary” days of April 1992. ”But business never came back up.”
”When that day happened, it made it much worse for us,” said Pam Gray, who is now the first assistant manager of a new Parts USA auto parts store built by the Pep Boys chain at Florence and Normandie as part of the recovery effort; five years ago she was nursing a newborn baby. ”You had to drive a million miles to get to a grocery store.”
”On a collective basis, I’m not sure our city has heeded the lessons very well,” said John Mack, the head of the Los Angeles branch of the Urban League. ”There are some individual, spectacular examples of progress. But there’s been too much of a tendency to make it a spectator sport.
”L.A. can become America’s Bosnia, or it can become America’s example in democracy. We’ve all got to extend ourselves a little.”
–excerpted from the NY Times article, “Legacy of Los Angeles Riots: Divisions Amid the Renewal” by Todd S. Purdum, April 27, 1997.
Kumamoto Love
Some are not impressed with oysters. But consider what Seamus Heaney wrote: “My tongue was a filling estuary, my palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water.”
I ate the day deliberately, that its tang might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
— Seamus Heaney
The Way Things Are
203 West 107th Street
I lived on 107th street with my parents until 1992. We were the only Koreans on our block. Where were the others?
I am reading Louise Bogan’s bio again, connecting with the turmoil of her young life. She recalls her mother as being unhappy and ready to take it out on her family. Her mother had relations with other men while exacting inappropriate feelings from her son. I understand being raised by a mother mired in an unrequited life, but I wish I could extricate myself from her long tail of dissatisfaction and chaos.
When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.
–excerpted from Medusa by Louise Bogan
I Write, Therefore I am Korean
My first book, One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons, took me about five years to put together. This second book, I Used To Be Korean, took a little bit less time. But, golly gee, book writing just takes a long time, huh?
I wonder at how people put out all their volumes and collections. I am amazed at the speed of their output and it brings me to wonder about my snail’s pace. I do honor and respect my output for what it is: I am a preschool teacher who up ’til last July was trying to take care of my Old Ladies. But they are both gone now and “every day is like Sunday; every day is silent and gray.” That should leave me more time to write, you say? Well, in theory, yes it should. But it’s not working out that way.
I think about Harley Elliott, a poet whom I trust to set me straight on the way of our finite human condition. I do mean the way we deal with being alive and how we make the most of our time on earth. Harley has published 11 books of poetry with two books out in 2020!: The Mercy of Distance (Hanging Loose Press) and Creature Way (Spartan Press) so he must know about finding the way to more writing.
I think of Bob Hershon who wrote about fifteen books throughout his writing life. His work is a body of knowledge connoting confidence, a savvy outlook on life with little second guessing. I admire that kind of knowing. Bob’s way of seeing the world. You may not be born with it, but it can be borne within you. It’s been almost two weeks since Bob passed and I am just coming to terms with knowing that we won’t be hanging out in his backyard, sipping on reasonably priced wine whilst ducking wayward acorns from those sassy Boerum Hill squirrels.
I know I will honor his memory and legacy by writing as much poetry as I can.
In memorium, Bob Hershon, poet, publisher, friend and eternal student of the School of Keep On Keeping On:
A Bad Dinner
by Bob Hershon
They gave me a bad dinner, not to make me a stranger
–Betsy Sheridan’s journal
They pelted me with rocks, not to take their love as my due
They burned my poems and papers, not to permit my self-love to
mount
They denounced me to the FBI, so I would not grow smug, in
comfort
and take their good will as a given
They pulled out my eyelashes, so I would not blink in amazment
They blew their noses in my socks, so I would not strut
They carved my name on a headstone, not to forget that I was
one of theirs, and they begin to carve the dates
Warrior Woman
I don’t remember ever being a grandchild, but I have the pictures to prove I was.
I like looking at photos of my grandma because she looks so much like my dad.
Put Your Game Face On
Constructing identity via found objects. Does that sound like your life?
The work to create your own sense of self that does not rely on other peoples’ ideals and ideas of you is tricky. How do you tell your own story of your vibrancy, agency and boldness without getting mixed up in stereotypes and misinformation?
Note: this DIY face portrait exploration is an ongoing project I am doing with my class of four year olds. We gather appealing found objects aka loose parts, draw and cut out our face shape, and then arrange the objects on our face canvas to create a portrait of ourselves. No glue needed.
Start with a canvas of your own making and then build from there…
I Used to Be Korean
I forget that my mom used to perm my hair when I was little. She might have done it especially for this photo, taken at a real life studio across the street from our old apartment building on 107th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.
The last time I tried to perm my hair, I might have been in college and realized just how straight my hair was because there was barely a ripple in it when I was done with all the rigamarole.
I have long ago come to terms with my long, straight, black hair, and I thank my ancestors for their generous gift every day.
