By Diana Khoi Nguyen
Featured Art: “Carrying Hay” by Hannah Hatley

Though Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry is a Korean film, I found myself thinking of the Vietnamese word nước, as the opening shot reveals rippling water. A close shot, bird’s eye view of the water, a near-black filter dissolving slowly from the sun-glinted ripples. Nước, meaning water first, for me. Nước, meaning also: country, state, the tide coming in, the tide going out. A place so connected to water it shares the word. The camera doesn’t fall into the river, but moves with it, panning to reveal grade-school-aged boys playing in the grassy sand bank, moving rocks, digging holes. The sun is overhead, it’s 11am perhaps, and the body of a 16-year-old girl floats along like the body of each young woman in every movie and television show I’ve seen before: dead.

Danusha Laméris touched briefly upon Poetry in an earlier New Ohio Review essay, “Beautiful, Brilliant, and Dead: Portraits of the Female Poet in Film.” She writes that literature and art are rife with images of dead women and dead poets: “[t]he dead girl, appearing again and again, by the river bank, in the river.” Kristy Guevara-Flanagan’s short film, What Happened to Her (2016), similarly examines contemporary culture’s obsession with dead women on screen. The dead girl in Poetry’s opening scene isn’t a poet, but she is a casualty in the world of cruel boys (and men); and her death eventually causes the film’s protagonist, Yang Mi-ja, to reflect on her life and society and write her first poem.

And Poetry, itself, feels like a poem: plot is more than mere narrative content; it serves as material arranged and composed in such a way that I found I could trace craft moves that exist in poetry writing: juxtaposition, (visual) syntactical surprise, the interwoven portraits of boys vs. girls, men vs. women . . . all of these have a metrical rhythm in the film. Perhaps what I am trying to describe is that while watching, I felt I was also reading a poem.

Early on, Mi-ja (Yun Jeong-hie), waits patiently in a local health clinic to see about the prickly sensation in her right arm, only to have the doctor inquire about her increasing forgetfulness with words. Isn’t this a game I play with my undergraduate students, the game in which they have to describe a word without saying the obvious words to describe that word? As the plot reveals the seriousness of Mi-ja’s forgetfulness (she is later diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s), I’m drawn to how Mi-ja uses language to describe around the thing she can’t say: “What’s that thing? What you put money in. It’s this big.” She means a wallet, but can’t bring the word to mind. Language as circumvention. A poem, too, can be like that doctor’s visit: you’re worried about your arm, and out of nowhere, the concern shifts to your forgetting words, the beginning, it seems, of your dementia.

Naturally, Mi-ja enrolls in a poetry class at the cultural center, and I must admit I felt skeptical, or, at least, braced myself for a poorly rendered facsimile of poetry instruction. Instead, it is spectacular and so remarkable that while watching Poetry, I was happily a student of poetry again. “To write poetry, you must see well,” are the first words of the poetry instructor, the actual Korean poet Kim Yong-taek, playing himself. “SEE,” he writes on the white board, “We live seeing things. It’s important to see well everything around us.” And he pulls out an apple from his pocket:

How many times have you seen an apple. A thousand? Ten thousand? A million? Wrong. Not even once. Up until now, you haven’t seen an apple for real. To really know what an apple is . . . to be interested in it, to understand it, to converse with it is really seeing it. Gazing at it for a while and observing its shadow, feeling its every curve, turning it around, taking a bite out of it, imagining the sunlight absorbed in it . . . That is really seeing it. If you really see something, you can feel something naturally, like water gathering in a spring.

But Mi-ja struggles to see: What’s really going on with her disaffected grandson who lives with her, or the apple in her kitchen, which she ends up peeling with a paring knife before eating it?

Gradually, Mi-ja takes to observing with perseverance and dedication: sitting with and seeing a tree, or removing herself from a meeting with her grandson’s friends’ fathers to note the color of flowers outside the window: “Blood . . . a flower as red as blood.” Before she notices that flower though, she learns in this meeting that something terrible has happened. The schoolgirl from the river, Agnes, committed suicide by jumping off a bridge, and there in her diary she had named the six classmates who had been serially raping her in a secluded science classroom. Mi-ja’s grandson is one of the boys. The fathers have convened to discuss the situation, how best to prevent unwanted attention on the school, and how to protect their sons’ futures with a payoff to Agnes’s mother. It’s a despicable scene in which no one fully acknowledges the atrocities that have been committed or treats the events with the sadness they would seem to deserve. No one “sees” Agnes. And while Mi-ja doesn’t know that her call to document a blood-red flower is the only honest linguistic response to the situation, we as viewers witness her poetry progression.

To witness Mi-ja is to encounter her poetics of empathy. Perhaps social customs do not allow for Mi-ja to have emotional outbursts, or to challenge the men directly. When the schoolboys’ fathers (prompted by their school) gather to brainstorm ways to protect their complicit boys, to cover-up their crimes, they enact a second violence in the wake of Agnes’ death. Mi-ja sits among them, the sole grandparent and woman in the group, and so she’s not part of the group at all: she is solitary and seems to refuse to gloss over the heinous crime the way the fathers do. Instead, she directly names the wounds and reverberations of harm to reorient their collective gaze to the death of the girl, the girl’s struggling single mother, the flowers bleeding defiantly in the sun.

Not unlike Mi-ja, I turned to taking an adult-school poetry course while working full-time in the tech sector; on the first day, we looked at Louise Glück’s “The Racer’s Widow,” and I was rapt, ignited by Glück’s compression of language, her incisive diction. I raced to devour her other poems and found myself drawn chiefly to those in which she gives voice to those who cannot speak for themselves: the red poppy who says, “Because in truth / I am speaking now / the way you do. I speak / because I am shattered.” Or Hansel’s sister, from “Gretel in Darkness”:

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you

Mi-ja and her grandson also begin to share a violent secret, and we watch her struggle to comprehend how her grandson demonstrates a lack of remorse for his and his friends’ heinous acts, and also refuses to acknowledge Agnes’s death, even after Mi-ja places a picture of Agnes on their kitchen table. These are quiet moments in the film. Mi-ja also rarely speaks when she is compelled to meet with the boys’ fathers; her nonverbal actions reflect her interior: she retraces Agnes’s death, visiting the bridge where she jumped. When she opens her notebook, the director gives us a close-up. First nothing, then one fat raindrop—or is it a tear?—falls on the blank page, then another and another. Immediately I was struck by the power of this wordless scene; I found it to be a filmic composition of visual poetry—as if the camera had translated an image from a poem’s stanza. In this moment, the camera captures how each raindrop marks the page, absorbing into the fibers of Mi-ja’s notebook, each one also emitting a sound. The pace is slow at first, then gathers momentum. Like a poet, rain, too, writes and reads aloud. For Mi-ja, and for myself, there might not always be words for what we are feeling, but we can still document experiences by the act of being present, by witnessing.

Plunged into an impossible situation, Mi-ja’s moral calculations in the film are never simple. As a part-time caretaker for an elderly man with limited mobility, she bathes him and refuses his plea, “Before I die, I wanna do it just once. . . . I wanna be a man. It’s my wish.” She quits the job. But she needs the money for her part of the payoff to Agnes’s mother. The film asks: If she pays, will she be complicit, will she be like the blasé fathers looking to sweep their sons’ violence under the rug? She is troubled by the boys’ and fathers’ failure to honestly see Agnes’s and her mother’s tragedy, but she understands their concern for their children as she, too, loves her grandson. To hold these two opposing things feels almost like a paradox—actually, it’s something sublime: to feel tenderness toward strangers, to be able to see the monstrous within our loved ones. Perhaps to be a poet is to be able to transcend parochial tribalism. When I think about Mi-ja, I think about how she is a citizen of the larger world, and not just her family.

When Mi-ja returns to tend to the elderly man after the sexual imposition, she is the agent in the situation, not the unwitting victim: she heads straight for his ED medication, initiates a bath in which she removes her clothes and enters the tub with him. It’s not kindness or tenderness that compels her; she later requests 5 million won from him without disclosing the reason. “Is this blackmail?” he scribbles as they converse via a notepad passed back and forth so as to be discreet, since his extended family is in the other room. Here, the monetary transaction is captured in writing, between caretaker and the one cared for, between sex worker and client. The transaction becomes a poem. This cash enables Mi-ja to afford her share of the hush money. But she will treat Agnes’s death differently from the fathers.

In another narrative thread, Mi-ja continues going to her poetry class, struggling to write a poem. When she starts attending a poetry reading series, she asks a woman who’s just performed, “You said you just started writing poetry recently. How could you write such amazing poems?” To which the woman responds, “As I wrote a line, words I was never aware of unraveled like a thread of silk.” When I shared with my spouse how accurate this was for my own poetry writing practice, he shared the process of working with melted nylon in a chemist’s beaker: if he slowly lifted a trace amount, a nylon thread would form, one monomer bonding to another, and another—the accretion of a line. Mi-ja’s story emerges like this, and even though she has been involved in blackmail and a hush-money payment, her moral creativity and poetic sensibility allow for a different ending. 

At the poetry reading series, there had been a police officer reciting poems and talking lewdly afterwards. “It’s like he’s insulting poetry,” Mi-ja remarks, though I found myself focused more on the poem he read, titled, “‘I ask you’ // Do not even dare to kick at the ashes of burnt coal. Have you ever been a burning person to another?” The scene gives us a chauvinist who may also help Mi-ja find justice for Agnes.

While Mi-ja might always avoid direct confrontation in larger social settings, she is resolute in that sense of justice. She works diligently, humanely to see Agnes, to see what happened to her, and what is happening behind the scenes in the wake of her death. As the film nears its end, we watch as that police officer Mi-ja has gotten to know approaches her grandson to arrest him. And so Mi-ja has funneled money to Agnes’s grieving mother, but it hasn’t been hush-money after all. She has, in a way, overcome her silence.

The film closes with Mi-ja’s poem, written in persona, “Agnes’ Song.” The closing lines are: “Now as darkness falls, will a candle be lit again? . . . Even the lonesome wild flower shyly turning away. How deeply I loved.” How painstaking it is to see, to really see—and commit to painful acts of care. How to do so, is an act of love—love for a stranger, love for a culpable grandson turned in by a loved one for his crime. Poetry, in Poetry, equips Mi-ja with both a wider breadth of vision, as well as something akin to a radiological vision which sharpens her moral imagination. Time, like a river, flows in one direction. Memory, like the tides, comes in and out. And as a new poet, Mi-ja has never seen as clearly as she does now.

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Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Root Fractures and Ghost Of. A Kundiman and MacDowell fellow, she teaches in the MFA programs at Randolph College and University of Pittsburgh.