Jimin Seo is the author of OSSIA, his debut collection of poetry. Winner of the The Changes Press Book prize, judged by Louise Glück, OSSIA blends the voices of the dead with the living, resulting in a symphonic exploration into migration, dislocation, familial bonds, love, and loss. Seo textures his manuscript with poems in both Korean and English, reflecting the double experience of growing up in both Seoul, Korea, and the U.S. South, and of queerness. Other poems speak directly to ghostly figures in his life – his mother, mentor Richard Howard, and his ex-lover. Previously published in Issue 25 of Four Way Review, Seo spoke to Four Way Review associate poetry editor Nicole W. Lee over Zoom in September. Their conversation has been edited and condensed.

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NL: I want to begin by acknowledging that this is an exceptional book. As a poet of the Chinese diaspora with my own multiplicities, I love how it engages with language, mothers, migration, and myth. It’s frankly unique in the way it refuses to participate in the performance of self-determination that’s sometimes expected of immigrant or queer narratives. And I love how it invites the reader to engage in the viscero-sonic experience of a body and mind crossing spatiotemporal, cultural, and semiotic borders. It’s amazing to think that this is your debut.

JS: Thank you!

NL: I have a funny story to share with you. When I read the title of your book, I initially thought OSSIA meant “bone” – I was thinking about the word “osseous,” which means bone. I was also thinking of two of your loved ones, whose voices feature throughout this book: your mother and your mentor Richard Howard, who, among other things, was the translator of Roland Barthes, Emil Cioran, Baudelaire, and Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. But I recently learned that “ossia” is a musical term that refers to an alternative passage that can be played instead of what is originally scored. I think the double resonance is incredibly fitting for your book as a whole.

So, speaking of bones – I know you graduated from your MFA in 2010, and your mother passed away in 2013. After that you didn’t write poetry for 8 years. Recently, Richard also passed away. If you’re willing to share, I’m curious about what drew you out of that silence? To, so to speak, to give voice to an “ossia” or “osseous.”

JS: My mom died on January 8th, 2013. And in the years preceding, I wrote extensively about my mother. The joke was that when I finished, I would finally stop writing about her. And then she died. I joke that she had the last laugh in some sense. She haunts me and it’s comforting. I tried to choose other subjects after she died, but they lacked intent and intensity. When I did write about her, it was hackneyed. Or rather, I was. In hindsight, I think this was my first brush with translation problems – translated into English, Korean can sound overly sentimental. I think that’s one reason I stopped writing. This was the first time language was an obstacle to feeling. English diffused sentiment, and I had long abandoned Korean as a mode of writing. So I decided to ask Richard about writer’s block, and he told me there was no such thing – it just meant I didn’t want to do it. And I didn’t. He gave me permission to stop. Granted, it frustrated Richard terribly. 

NL: Sometimes in periods of intense emotion, I feel like you need some space for the body to process.

JS: Yeah. My body was mechanically working to do the right things. Taking care of my people. Writing. But I think deep in my psyche, when I was writing poems – building poems – to use that verb, it wasn’t revealing anything. 

It was during the pandemic I started to write again. I gave myself the task of writing a sonnet crown. I told myself I’d do it strictly: meter, rhyme, everything, and then oh my god this is not working. I constrained myself too much, so I decided to break it. I rearranged the lines until it was usable. The crown, in its musical equivalent, works as a set of themes and variations. It gave me a duration and continuity I couldn’t enact when my mother died.

Funny thing is the crown didn’t work. I’d made too many variations. A Spenserian, a Shakespearean, bastardized Petrarch. I remember laughing about it. The project seemed to enact my mother’s death. It was a failure of a life. Desperately, I translated the crown into Korean and it magically worked. I returned to the sentiment of my first language. 

I think this allowed me to carry on. I mean, everyone was dying in 2021. I was already in a death state in my own writing, my own family, my relationship was failing too, I think. The crown allowed me to continue. In Korean we use the verb 짓다  – “to build” – for poems, houses, and medicine, and I guess in Chinese too, since the Hanja is 作. If I were to say I write a poem, it sounds gaseous and ephemeral. It’s abstracted. But if I build, it has volume, body, and duration. It’s physical. I’m in it. 

NL: Yes, and as you’ve mentioned previously, the word for “author” is the same in Chinese and Hanja, 作家. 

I love that the crown enabled you to bring together all of the elements that would become your book! The formalism, primarily, but also the musicality, and the use of Korean. I didn’t know that was how the Korean entered the work. 

I’m curious: was that the first time you used Korean in your poetry?

JS: It was. I think it has to do with being in white dominant institutions. There’s a sense of performance in whiteness – my fascination with modernism, or, as for you, fascination with Shakespeare – that denoted a kind of mastery. And I was writing in English. I wrote technically pristine things, a cold demonstration of technique, though deep down I knew something was missing. It’s funny, because this is what Asian musicians are often told, technically brilliant, but no soul.

I understand English now as a form of abstraction and a kind of obstacle for image-making. I was amazed when I began writing in Korean. Images everywhere! I found that as I would translate my own English poems into Korean, the approximation, or the truth of the translation was actually in Korean image.

NL: That really resonates with me, as I’m currently trying to learn more Chinese, both classical and modern. And it really can be a, let’s say – I don’t want to perpetuate Pound’s ideas of Chinese being a language full of little pictures, because it isn’t – but it can be a very metaphorical one. 

I feel this is a lovely little segway into my next question, which is about the bilingualism of this book. You grew up in Korea until the age of 8. Then you came to the U.S., where you lived in Jacksonville, Florida until you moved to New York. By this, I mean you grew up not only bilingual, but also as someone who experienced both a Korean and an American life. And if we characterize it by what you’ve said – your experience was a bodily one, and an abstract, performative one.

I imagine you carry your Korean inside you like a Russian doll. I’m framing it like this, as I feel this book directly reflects the experience of a person with two cultures. The book is written primarily in English, but alongside the English poems are those in Korean. To the uninterested English reader, they might seem like a direct translation of English poems. But a more curious reader might realize that some of these poems reveal another element or experience of the speaker. The voices in the Korean poems are in many ways more intimate, more direct than the voice of the English speaker. For example, the English translation of the poem titled “깨어나라 깨어나라 엿먹어라” is “wake up, wake up, fuck you.” 

When I was thinking about this question, I initially wanted to ask you about writing a book that’s only fully legible to someone who speaks Korean and English. But I also want to ask you about the voices in Korean being more of your body versus the more performative, highly literary voice of the English speaker. What does it mean to live these two worlds – as well as the intersection of queerness – knowing it’s all a performance?

JS: Well, the language aspect of it – “깨어나라 깨어나라 엿먹어라,” or  “wake up, wake up, fuck you” – is exactly the rejection of a particular reader – including me – the English speaker that is the nesting doll inside of me. The first poem, “Pastoral” is a direct address to the reader – to say, you’ve gotten me wrong – to say, here’s a narrative that you think you know. It’s a self-admonishment. Because in translation, “엿먹어라” means “eat candy.” 엿 is a kind of Korean candy, but it’s also a slur. In English I translate the slur into “eat shit,” or “fuck you,” and that’s coding. It’s like the politeness an immigrant builds to assimilate acceptability, to be easily absorbed into American society. Like smiling when it actually means fuck off.

That’s the experience of growing up as a Korean person, and an American person, and a Southern person, in Jacksonville, Florida. Everything has to be coded – my queerness, my Koreanness. As much as I would like to say the American and the Korean intertwine, they don’t. 

So it does feel very separate for me, and I see this in the works of first-generation Koreans. I read their work, and it’s very different from my own sensibilities. I realize it’s because I don’t really know what it means to be Korean American. I renounced my citizenship when I became naturalized and earned the hyphen between Korean and American by giving up my passport. And it’s just a play of language, legal and politic, but the interiorly shift doesn’t matter. So I still, very much, feel like I’m two distinct people, or, actually, neither. I don’t know if I feel American. I don’t know if I feel Korean, but I do know I don’t feel like an Asian American. To hybridize by renunciation seems absurd.

NL: I understand that. I mean, on the flip side, I’m first generation, and my experience cannot be bilingual, because I’m not bilingual. I know some Chinese but I’m not fluent. The experience of being a Chinese person brought up in China and being part of the Chinese diaspora is wildly different on so many levels – spiritual, psychic, bodily even. So absolutely, the distinction between Asian American, and Asian and American, is a specific thing. I also have the added confusion of being partly educated and having lived in the States but growing up in Australia – Asian American and Asian Australian are themselves distinct histories and identities – and I’m often equally unsure as to what the hyphens mean. 

Let’s talk about music now. To me, this book is symphonic – from the way it’s structured into parts, like movements or variations on a theme, to the individual sequences themselves. I’m thinking of course, of the Richard series which sits in many genres and styles: dramatic monologue, direct address, epistolary, call and response, but also the fugue. I don’t know if you were thinking about this when you were writing the poems, but they make me think of Bach and his choral pieces. 

You and I have often talked about how your poems “sing.” We’ve also talked a lot about the object correlative, and how you return and transform an image throughout a poem like a musical motif, as in a fugue. I mean, to quote an example I’ve always loved is the way the image of the plum, divisions, and memory transforms from the speaker’s to Richard’s in “Richard Remembers”: “Richard, there is never enough music in the background / to fill the middle ground between illness and speech and body and / plums fruiting in the street vendor’s cart arranged like a 3-part fugue” to Richard’s response: “I catch what light slips / me: the name of a fruit as color, the good / taste of purple, a visitor’s too friendly voice as if I too am divided into fractions.” I mean, it’s just stunning. 

I’m talking about all of this because I know your background as a classical pianist, which you were training professionally in until you had to give it up after an accident. I also know you’re interested in the Objectivists, Zukofsky in particular, as well as Oppen’s interest in the presentation of objects without commentary. This comes across in your sonically textured presentation of images without explication. After all, it was Zukofsky who said: “an order of words that as movement and tone (rhythm and pitch) approaches in varying degrees the wordless art of music.” Could you talk a little bit about your past as a classical pianist, how you made your way to poetry, and the influence of music on your book, as well as that of the Objectivists’? 

JS: Sure. You know that it’s so funny you pick that quote about plums. I was thinking of you when I wrote it.

NL: You were??

JS:  That line, that sensibility of the line, the sound came from you specifically.

NL: Oh, that’s so funny!

JS: Yeah. You know, I think it makes sense because a tradition in music is quotation. Honoring a composer and their music by quoting an exact passage into a new work. 

Your interpretation of my sensibilities is also right, because initially I called the sequence “Three-Part Inventions,” Bach’s instructional methodology to teach however many – like 8 or 13 children – that he had. And Richard also had a book called Two-Part Inventions. This was a way to quote Richard’s memory, in music. 

I came to poetry through music, and just like your training as an actor informs your writing, music informs my poet sensibilities. I began studying classical piano when I was 5 or so. I was a very bad student – my parents were in the US and there was no one to discipline me. But one day I was signed up to play a competition. I memorized the piece, worked out all the fingerings in one day and played – apparently beautifully – and won a box of yogurt. That’s how my music journey started.

When I came to the US, I continued lessons, and eventually went to university for it. In my third year of uni, practicing a concerto with fast octave passages, my index finger went numb. So I signed up for a poetry class as something of a musical invalid and became a poet. It was all an accident. 

One of the first things the poetry professor said was that you have a voice already. I was like, what does that mean? It ran against what I was told in piano. That I was technically very good, but where’s your soul? So when I was told I already had a developed voice, I didn’t believe it. What does it mean for a poet to have a voice? Knowing more now, I think voice in poetry is the line sense and sound. So when I came around to the Objectivists, it was a lot like listening to classical music. It was recognition. 

What’s interesting is how for the most part, classical musicians only play the dead masters. We obey, and say, “this is great music.” Though, if you think about it, why? It’s so subjective. But I do think musical training gives you a bar for what is good, or masterful.  When I read the Objectivists – when I read Oppen – the way it was structured, the mystery, and the way it fell in my ear, it was as close to music as it got. 

NL: I want to keep talking about your influences. We’ve often talked together about how, through the privilege and curse of having been brought up in colonial Anglophone societies. But you’ve also had the added influence of French novels and their long, mellifluous lines, as well as Richard’s influence. So again I have a several part question for you: could you talk about the influence of the long French sentence on your poetry, and if Richard’s poetics influenced yours, what that effect was? 

JS: So my complaint in my own poetics is I only know how to sing. I don’t know how to talk. My proximity to Richard helped me talk. Particularly in dramatic monologue.

Really though, I didn’t show Richard many poems. I had him for one semester, and then I became his assistant. Being so close to him, and then reading his work, I think I just learned by proximity. I absorbed his fondness for language. There’s a wonderful line in his poem “The Manatee,” where he writes, “a manatee emanates.” The nearness of manatee and emanate – the two words resonate and become more than themselves. There’s a sense with Richard, when you read his work, and in real life, that he got so much joy out of the exact use of a word. Joy comes to me most when a mystery is enacted in the exactness of words.

So the French sensibility, I mean. I think that’s interesting, because when I started learning French it never occurred to me that it was my third language. I always considered it my second. I think I gravitated towards French because it’s the “sophisticated” language, from an immigrant socioeconomic perspective. I don’t know if it’s fair to say French is easy on the ear –

NL: – easy on the ear, perhaps, as constructed by English speakers –

JS: – but there’s an exactness that French has that I think really appealed to my sense of severity. I also think French generates an atmosphere – I’ll call it “aura.” When I’m writing in Korean, I think Korean lends an aura I can’t feel in English. It is an extremely clinical language for me. And I think French gave me this equivalent in a non-Asiatic language that also generated an aura. But actually, I think the French long sentence, or that sensibility, probably came through music for me. It’s like Ravel – the pedal, the ambience, the mood. It didn’t come so much in literature. I think it came probably through music first, and very formatively. I started music before I learned English.

NL: That’s another great segue onto the last question. I want to talk now about the Ossia poems. We met at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference during the Covid-19 lockdown. At that stage you were writing the first drafts of these poems, which was a long sequence in the voice of your mother. Later on, you wrote another series of poems that were in the voices of your parents called “Profanities.” These two combined to become what are now the Ossia poems.  I was actually reading over a version of the manuscript you sent me earlier and I was marveling at the changes you made. I was wondering if you could talk a little about how you arrived at this sequence’s final form? When did you decide you wanted to rearrange it, and what was your process in doing so?

And then, of course, because we’ve talked about Korean as a bodily language – if French is a kind of migrant passport into some level of acceptance by white hierarchies, what does it mean to you to write poems that engage with Korean? I’m asking this because unlike the Korean poems in the Richard series, which are direct translations of the English poems, in the Ossia series, the Korean poems are independent poems that you would only be able to access if you knew Korean. 

JS: What does it mean to be colonized? Don Mee Choi talks about Korea as an example of a neo-colony. So I’m interested in how that affects language, coming here as a migrant. 

It’s interesting, in the States you have the profound experience of racism against the Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act, for instance. In the American psyche, the sound of Chinese sonics and language is very much ingrained and made fun of, in the media and whatnot. For example, the TV show M*A*S*H was set during the Korean war, but the Koreans were actually Chinese actors speaking Korean in a Chinese accent.

So what’s interesting about Korean in terms of language is that it’s not very well known. Because if you’re speaking Korean, a random American person will say, why are you speaking Chinese? It’s a weird double perception where Koreans become American but then we’re filtered through existing perceptions of the Chinese. Then there’s the geopolitical relationship between China and Korea. Because, of course, you hear about tensions with Japan and China and that relationship carries over into America. So you come in as a Korean, and then you don’t want to be perceived as another Chinese immigrant, but you don’t want to be perceived as Korean either. It’s not really conscious, I think, as a child. But then you kind of grow up in it.

I think what happens is that the Korean language becomes a language of unidentified shame. You don’t know why you’re ashamed to speak it, because you’re also working against perceptions, other ethnicities. At least that was my experience. And then there is the complication of being in the South and the racism against Black Americans. 

When I came here, I only spoke Korean at home. We weren’t allowed to speak English to my parents. And that’s probably how I retained my Korean. But then it became a private language – when you were outside, your privacy was tucked in, and the public facing language was English. You move in social circles with English. You don’t have Korean friends, even if you meet a non-native speaker. You talk in English. English becomes the functional language. You become more adept with the flexibilities and the nuances of that language to hide. Because all we’re doing with the English language is hiding. And then, you forget about the Korean, like when I said I thought French was my second language, and not my third.

What’s funny about the Ossia poems is how they’re both in the voices of my mother, the English and the Korean. The Korean portion is my mother, blaming me for writing about her, in her voice, in English. The first Korean Ossia says “Do you feel better turning me into a white goddess? Does it make you feel better? Why do I have to come back?” It’s my mother chastising me. Still, it’s not her. It’s me chastising myself. Why am I re-animating the dead? What’s the use of doing that? Because it’s purely for me. And here I’m turning her into a book, and her voice, which is not really her voice.

It’s a secret. Most people would assume the Korean in the book is a translation. They’re my most private poems because they’re not translated. It’s my way of keeping a kind of privacy, because Korean isn’t a primary power language, globally speaking. 

I like how it disrupts hierarchy. I think it’s necessary that you don’t understand the full scope of a person. In real life, you don’t understand someone fully unless they speak, you have to listen. The poem does the same thing. It gives you a visual representation of Korean that most people will probably ignore or just see as visual. And that’s the experience of how people engage with others, the visual assumptions. You’re not allowed to speak. And I like how the poem replicates that.

NL: That’s so brilliant! I love the way you describe this – the poem as replicating the visual presentation of a person in real life. That’s so true.

JS: Yeah. As for the sequencing process, the book was initially in 4 sections. For someone who’s so apparently about programming, I just did it in the sequence it was written in. The Venus poems, or the Ossia poems, were at the end. And I knew I absolutely hated the Venus poems.

NL:  You talked about it.

JS: Yeah. And then, you know, when I turned it into my editor, he said, would you be open to re-sequencing these? I said yes, I want to make it without sections. And I knew I had to rewrite the Venus poem which made me think about how the voices kind of weave in and out of each other. It seemed to make more sense with the conceit of the book as a series of alternates, which of course is the definition of “ossia.”

The original title was Furniture Music – music that is ignored. That would have suggested that the poems floated ambiently only. In the resequencing, the poems had to be a full comprehensible score. It required a series of movements, or it had to be through-composed. In some ways it is a long poem, with a series of alternates.

I had to understand what each voice was doing, and whether it was okay to separate the Richard poems. That was the main concern. And what spacing them out would do. I had to dismantle “Profanities” as a section. Doing that was giving up a conceit. If I had a section that said “Profanities,” you would know what it is. But then I realized, well, it doesn’t have to be that – the idea of voice confusion was actually apt for this book. Because I think initially, I was concerned there were four distinct voices when they’re all in my voice. It made more sense to weave all of them together. Because these voices live in my body, so let me merge them. All the voices happen simultaneously and nonlinearly. It’s just a big, loud, merged voice, and separate voices, at the same time.

NL: I think that’s a beautiful way to end this interview. I’m so glad we got to unpack your collection in this way together.

JS: Thanks Nicole!