In one of the many notes to Mirror Nation (the notes both citations and extensions of the poems themselves), the final book in Don Mee Choi’s trilogy of documentary poetry charting political erasures in the modern history of Southern Korea (and by extension modern history itself, and by extension language itself, thus X = X = X), Choi writes that
I adopted (W.G.) Sebald’s recurring arrangement of photos in threes as a syntax for the language of grief, as it might’ve been for Sebald, too.= is also a syntax, a syntax that enables multiple places and times to coexist simultaneously. I inherited = from Aime Cesaire and Gertrude Stein. = has a double function. It also functions as an anti-neocolonial sign, which is to say translation is an anti-neocolonial mode (see DMZ Colony).
If language is policed, much of the policing is done by punctuation =
Experimenting with punctuation is a means to de-policing language =
De-policing language is a means to de-policing our minds
( mind = selves = reality = world)
One of my poems from my future book on desire (first published in Poet Lore, Winter 2022):
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