Do you write from memory?
“We don't have to manufacture this mystery, it's already built into the way our mind moves..." — KAYLEE YOUNG-EUN JEONG, Poet of the Week
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Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong is from Oregon and lives in New York. Her work appears in Shenandoah, The Columbia Review, and Diode Poetry Journal, among others. She loves her parents, her brother, Anne Carson, and her platform shoes.
Translation Theory
We can only access what is real through the mediation of language, but that doesn't mean if you stick a knife through your chest you're not going to get hurt. What I mean: our bodies get in the way of our souls all the time. It's not the words, it's the gesture of them. Going through us like bullets through trees. Not the little birds falling to the ground, but their falling. Not their falling, but something in the stretch they have to fall. When two people walk into an open field, each holding a pistol, facing each other, walking backwards, counting down, it's not each other they're shooting at, but the distance between them. I would rip out my heart to give to you but that's not what I'm trying to say. What am I trying to say? When I was a kid my dad punched my bedroom door and the tear in the paint looked like a face. I wanted to be good, said the face. I believe you, I said, I believe you, Dad, I do.
“We don't have to manufacture this mystery, it's already built into the way our mind moves, beyond our capacity to understand. The decisions I try to make present the strange dance of the mind as faithfully and attentively as possible.”
“…when I was a kid, I remember seeing a safety warning on TV one Halloween about kids choking to death on hard candies. I hated hard candies, but pretended to like them and traded my little brother for all of his, giving him all the candies I actually liked, because I was terrified he'd die. For some reason, it would have killed me to just tell him to be careful because I cared about him and loved him, so I had to go this weird, roundabout route. I feel like that's what language is like, if that makes sense. And I love poetry because it feels like a way to go beyond the limits of language, to begin to see the shape of what we really mean. A poem, for me, would be whatever I was trying so hard to tell my brother at that moment and didn't know how to.
Do you write from memory?
You can catch up on some of the answers to last week’s question here:
This week, inspired by Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong’s interview, we’re wondering if you write poetry (or fiction) from memory or is it, perhaps, the other way around? How fluid is memory, or how fluid should it be if and when serving the poem?
I work with my hands so all my poems I first composed orally. When I write, I don't write, I just write words down that are in my mouth already.
Do I write from memory? You'd think I'd say yes, perhaps, because whatever touches me - whether it's the hum of the wall from the drill bit in the flat next door, or the snoring of my little sister, or the stony sweetness of a packet of juice, or the oily smoothness of a keyboard - it will all be reflected in my memory and stay there. But the thing is, I don't want to write about renovations, the appearance of someone else's dream, food, or dirt. I, you know, want to praise the lace of light, the glow of blue ribbons and the roundness of convex mirrors - basically, everything that has never touched me. Because I've never seen light speckled through the holey canvas of clouds. I never wore thick blue ribbons tied under my breasts. I have never been painted against a convex mirror. But I write about them, even though they were never in my memory.