I have been thinking about the temporality of apocalypse as it relates to a series from the poet Myung Mi Kim’s volume Penury (which means: poverty, or dearth). Kim’s vision of living on after the onset of apocalypse challenges us to rethink the ways that we conceptualize contemporary crisis and our relation to it, the prospect of our own annihilation, and that ambiguous remainder with which we are left that we so often call, for lack of a better name, “the future.” In Kim’s long poem “fell (for six multilingual voices),” which appears at the center of Penury, the consequences of human development, militarization, and war are registered in ecological terms, and imagining the ramifications of these human activities for humans, animals, plants, and environments entails inhabiting a complex temporality in which deracination (to borrow a term Kim herself employs) and apocalypse have, to a certain degree, already occurred. In Kim, it is only at this site—in the aftermath of the onset of “the end,” that precarious limit between presence and absence—that the unfolding of new languages and forms of embodied, ecological relation can be thought.
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Angela Hume: “An Ecopoetics of the Limit: Myung Mi Kim’s ‘fell’”
Poetry: Jeffrey Pethybridge
The Book of Lamps, being a psalm-book
Drug-tired, at a loss, how to fuel and busy the engines of resistance, to make of the ceaseless
and self-annihilating speech of inwardness, speech against self-annihilation, like a speech
before the gate-work, before the limit-work of setting-out, ostracized, for when Bellerophon
became hated by the gods [of Money] he wandered all the black earth, eating his heart out,
refusing the roads and trusts of men, but he did not jump, he wandered––ostracized––
in the debtor’s prison of his own skin, sucking the black extract from his heart and refusing
to jump, heart swollen by depression, swollen by debt, swollen from the refusal of trusts,
he made his heart the two-fisted engine against self-annihilation, o sad gargantuan,
Visual Poetry: Nico Vassilakis
Deteriorata/Accumulata
Poetry: Ravi Shankar
Revivals to Schopenhauer
Poetry and Translation: Ryszard Krynicki translated by Ewa Chrusciel
These poems and the essay following will appear in the anthology On the Endless Horizon: A Poet’s Field Guide to Literary Translation, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2014.