The heat of the midday sun is obvious, but the pressure of populations on the inadequate areas of flat land

has to be inferred. To best a well-oiled and amassing machine, for example, comunication, or Literature, one must learn to do what the machine cannot do. For Myung Mi Kim, this takes the form of poetic assemblages of minutae, or of large untouching wholes, to flood-light the power relations inherent in a system such as language. To intentionally depict fragments and memories as narrative, Mi Kim weaves a veritable Wasteland ringing with voices, interrogating their interpretation and always, always, gesturing at the absent. Mi Kims work has been described as living in the in-between, resting inside the pressured borders of elision, calling attention to the surrounding absenses. Or in their own words, The practice of the poem is the radical materiality/ Poised at the question of the question of the proximal. Mi Kims work is part reconfiguration, media report, memory, narrative, anatomical sensation, and especially the aural experience of language. They speak of formally radical processes. For example discussing the lack of modifiers in their work, they respond with they are not a description for the thing, it is the thing, a direct treatment, what is it to have perception that is unfettered from description. Time, location, voice are decontextualized. Mi Kim hopes QUOTE that writing does not identify its object they ask, is it possible to suggest the space which we call language doesnt belong to any particular group or idea: to understand it as a ressource for experience...an experience of language: everyone has access to that. The untranslatable, the unsayable is understood as a certain kind of social force. To quote from Commons, published in 2002: The transition from the stability and absoluteness of the worlds contents/ to their dissolution into motions and relations./ P: Of what use are the senses to us-- tell me that/ E: To indicate, to make known, to testify in part/ Burning eye seen/ Of that One eye seen bo-bo-bo k-k-k Jack in the pulpit petaling To a body of infinite size there can be ascribed neither center no boundary Mi Kim is often labelled as an Asian American poet." In response to geographically, and historically specific readings of their work, Mi Kim responds with a statement to the inutility of identity constructions, Any movement that can name itself has already begun to erase itself. To name/to thematize is to open to dismissal, to be reduced QUOTE I would hope that what I am doing in my work is raising questions about how the location of Asian American, Korean American, immigrant, female, and so on can resist commodification. Reframing questions about the cultural origins of their work, Mi Kim highlights the privilege involved in the jump of asserting that what the author produces speaks to the authors experience or environment. Or put another way, of the tenuous link between object & subject, between memories & what may be called factual reality. Mi Kims work questions epistemological assumptions of a reality in contrast to a subjectivity. It is through the tendency in this enquiry to seek meaning-ful" narrative, that Mi Kim asks QUOTE How is it possible to keep extending the terms of meaning-making and sense-making? Examples

abound in their work: periplus voyage around a coastline or the narrative of such a voyage or the overt The central organizing myth of comprehensive knowledge. Mi Kim asks what does it mean to both identify and to not locate. They are interested in the social orders that get rehearsed when we pose questions, such as, i do not understand this. Where rehearsal, understood as repetition, is QUOTE part of mastery, and the process of reanimating language fluency, transparency, communicability, language is already plural, multiple, collective.Who has the priviellege to say this is transparent/or rendered transparent? In this way they are interrogative of the archive, as material of the poem. Their work is in conversation with form, playing with form and form as critique; with unaculturated modes of inquiry made available through practice. Myung Mi Kim is the author of 6 books of poetry including Under Flag (1991) which won the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Award of Merit; The Bounty (1996), DURA (1999), River Antes (2006), and most recently Penury (2009). Born in Seoul, Korea, at 9 years old there family immigrated to the United States wherein they currently live. Mi Kim earned a BA from Oberlin College, an MA from The Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa. They teach English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and have received awards from the Fund for Poetry, a Daesan Foundation Translation Grant, and the State University of New York Chancellors Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity. Anthologies their work has appeared in include American Poets in the 21st century, Moving Borders, Premonitions, and Making More Waves, among others. It is my pleasure to welcome Myung Mi Kim.