Associate Editor Lisa Low: In Mia Kang’s “About,” the stuff of writing is simultaneously texture, obstacle, and process. As the title previews for us, the aboutness of poems takes center stage even as we understand that part of aboutness will continue to shift or remain elusive. In the second half of the poem, the complexities of subject matter and subjecthood run into technology and its ramifications for both writing and the self: “Year-end best-of lists proliferate and haunt // a clickable future which is not affordable.” “About” is a future-thinking ars poetica for both today’s and tomorrow’s poets.
About
Writing ability, meaning abandonment. Memorize
license plates, star charts, medical histories.
Some of what is not available. Some handprint
in the concrete, as if glyph
could cauterize apostasy. Meek wilting leaves
on the potted plant, temporarily housed.
No hanging around in subjecthood.
Seeing would do. Text bleeds through
the too-thin page, what summons
but can’t keep it. Running out
of coffee, paper towels, unchipped plates.
Year-end best-of lists proliferate and haunt
a clickable future which is not affordable.
This poem doesn’t make it. Craft wheezes
in the direction of psychology, if only
paranoia presented prizes for the price.
The loop does not refresh except
when the form requires personal data.
Lacking the personal, demographics will do
for submission unto genre. Loss precedes
this illusory abundance. Losing it plays well, not.
Mia Kang (she/her) is the author of City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020). Recent work appears in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, and wildness. Mia is a PhD candidate in history of art at Yale, and she currently serves as interim director of the Museo del Westside in San Antonio, TX.
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