"Here, This Speck and This Speck That You Missed": A Poetics of the Archive in Myung Mi Kim's Commons

This paper explores Myung Mi Kim's poetics of the archive in Commons. Commons begins with a gesture that critiques a prior act of archivization: "Here, this speck and this speck that you missed." As the poems accrue in the book, Commons demonstrates the desire to record those experiences that have been neglected by the architects of traditional archives while at the same time interrogating the very logic of the archive. Crucial to that interrogation is the poetic form. Kim's attempt to archive silences and gaps leads to a radical experiment with form and language. It reformulates the archive as an open system amenable to interruption, extension, and revision. I examine in detail the techniques that contribute to her poetics of the archive, a poetics that draws the readers out of the narrow confines of their personal experiences and their political identities. By juxtaposing Kim's poems with her statements of poetics given as interviews, this paper connects the project of Commons to Kim's larger concern with open form and experimental writing. I argue that the "difficulty" of her poetry should be reinterpreted as a demand that her text makes on the readers to broaden their terms of engagement. The linguistic experiment of Commons provides an occasion to rethink the habitual ways in which time is experienced, national histories are written, and literary works are consumed.