Speak and it is sound in time

In her fourth volume of poetry, Commons (2002), Myung Mi Kim raises a number of questions which underline the challenges and politics of a language-centered poetics that she has developed since her first volume, Under Flag (1991). "What is English now, in the face of mass global migrations, ecological degradations, shifts and upheavals in identifications of gender and labor? How can the diction(s), register(s), inflections(s) as well as varying affective stances that have and will continue to filter into 'English' be taken into account? What are the implications of writing at this moment, in precisely this 'America'? How to practice and make plural the written and spoken-grammars, syntaxes, textures, intonations" ("Pollen Fossil Record" Commons 110). While engaging with these questions in her poems, Kim investigates otherness in gendered and raced power relations, and in the encounters between nations, cultures, and languages. Writing about Korean Americans' experience of exile and diaspora resulting from imperialist conquest, transnational accumulation of capital, and migration of labor, Kim, like John Yau, is particularly interested in the ways in which English is "contaminated" by immigrants. Her rendering of English with "foreign" accents dislodges binary constructs of national and ethnic identities which assume essence, fixity, and hierarchy. Interweaving her investigation of language with an exploration of collective memory and history, Kim examines what she refers to as "the questions of translation between cultures and languages and in particular the kinds of resemblances and contaminations that inform how language(s) systematize and engender notions of power" (J. K. Lee 94).