Poem366: “The People’s Field” by Haesong Kwon

The People’s Field by Haesong Kwon

The People’s Field by Haesong Kwon, Cape Girardeau, Missouri: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2019

It is a pleasure to feature a title from a Show-Me State press on today’s Poem366. The People’s Field by Haesong Kwon is the winner of the Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press in the historic Mississippi River town of Cape Girardeau.

While the press is local to Missouri, poetry itself is transcendent of time and place, and Kwon lives in Shiprock, New Mexico. He teaches at Diné College, which serves the Navajo Nation, and many of these poems are about war-era Korea. Here’s a moving example, included in full because of its brevity:

Beret

A nest of sun rays

rattles about the grassed

tombstone of Hamchunk.

He wept so dearly

for the U.S. soldier

creamed in a booby trap.

There were fence

doves and leaves

to see his passage

to the next.

I have had a hard time finding any information about the poet, though one review by a writer who knows him acknowledges that he is elusive. A bio I found identifies him as being of Korean descent, having been born in Incheon, Korea, and moved to the United States when he was eight. A scene like that in “Beret” feels as immediate as if from personal observation, but I’m fairly certain the timeline doesn’t synch for that to be the case. This suggests that Kwon is writing about cultural, rather than personal, memory, and that’s a project that interests me very much.

More clues to his connection to Japan- and U.S.-occupied Korea are found in the long poem “The Kuomintang Had Been Duped,” where Kwon describes his grandfather:

Early, slow

to impose, resembling

his boy, my

father, watching

the sidewalk glow.

A mass of garish

phoenix birds

burned

on backs

and arms

of U.S. soldiers.

This sort of imaginative DNA puts me in mind of recent research establishing how trauma can be passed down through generations via chemical tags on our genes. Storytelling gets us there more directly, I suppose, and in a Navajo community, Kwon spends his days steeped in a storytelling tradition. It’s no wonder he writes so evocatively about memory older than self.

I lost myself today in this beautiful collection. Connective tissue within and between poems is sheer; sometimes it’s a leap from one line or even one word to the next. But it’s rewarding to contemplate or invent the connection, and the effect is to involve the reader in meaning-making.