Povel

Povel is a piece of candy. Or a pap smear exam. And eating a piece of candy while you’re on the pap smear table obtaining the exam. It depends which passage you’re reading.

Geraldine Kim has created an internal exam that is sometimes as sweet as candy, and other times as cold, probing, and distressful as anything medical.

One of the aspects I like most about this book is the option of opening it up to any random page to see what Kim has to say.

The passages are written in justified, quoted paragraphs that follow no particular narrative path, which raises, for me, a concern about the term “povel.” Off the top of my head, I can think of two words that seem more fitting for Kim’s work: “pessay” or “pemoir.”

I have no qualms with Kim’s prosodic attention, deserving of the poetry half of “povel.” It’s the novel part that worries me. Okay, so Kim never says “this is a biographical account of my life.” And true, all of her passages are framed within the dubious comfort of quotation marks. Yet the passages are written from the first person point of view, probing into the memory bank of whoever the neurotic speaker is.

Well, whether the story is more pemoir than povel is a moot point to bring up. All I’m saying is Kim’s “fictitious” speaker is likable. What is not to like about those darting, ADD thoughts that fill in the gaps between more meaningful reflections that we all have, such as:

“The T-shirt says, ‘Only the strong survive,’ and it has a picture of New Jersey behind it. Try writing with your left hand.”

And two sentences later in the same paragraph, Kim writes, “Stop asking me what race I am.”

Reading Kim’s book is like taking a trip inside another person’s brain, listening in on the filtered thoughts as they sip a Starbuck’s coffee. But it’s more than that. Kim manages to capture the essence of a wide range of thoughts. Take anxiety for example:

“Can’t keep my hands still. Like a room filled with emptied crates. I finally tell my parents I don’t want to go to law school either. Feeling like jumping out of the car.”

Kim’s work falls under the Language poetry umbrella, where postmodern writers such as Ron Silliman’s “Paradise” have taken shelter, where plot and other conventional narrative structures are not the focus.

Language poetry is meant to invite the reader to participate in the creative process. And to get political here, Language poetry is meant to sever itself from commodity, to free itself from the fate of the repressed signifier.

Pick up the book. It’s worth the effort. Or as Kim would say:

 “They had a player piano. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose, I thought.”