Come celebrate the release of David Seung’s debut poetry collection from The Song Cave: Silkworm’s Pansori! He will be joined by Janice Lee.
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DAVID SEUNG is a Korean-American standup comedian and writer advocating for his hometown of downtown Portland, Oregon through his walking tour company, Side Dish Mafia Food Tours. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University, where he now in turn teaches.
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David Seung's debut book of poems, Silkworm's Pansori, is a collection of English-language sijo poems: a traditional Korean poetic form that is straightforward in its syntax but emotionally nuanced. Following this historical form closely, these are poems of elegance and understatement, like a painted still life imbued with heartbreaking subtlety and metaphor. Yet the poet can only get so far with this exercise before his own personal history, a family legacy of war and torture, starts creeping in to shatter the otherwise poetic calm. Inserted toward the end of the book is the Korean Declaration of Independence; among the signers is the poet’s great-great-grandfather. Asking the reader to contextualize this document with the history of sijo and his own family saga, Seung gracefully addresses generations of anger and pain, and reflects on the intricacies of human existence.
“I remember that I’m always angry. Wickless. Our family’s name, the one we clung to, means inheritance.” Whether in haunting prose poems or playful sijo, inheritance is alive in Seung’s poems. Here, the ancient and present touch, such as in “DMZ Fable” where we watch “the last Korean tiger/ pawing at a land mine” or living in “my father’s father’s father” like “Sisyphus’s kidney stone” in “Parthenogenesis.” At turns sacred and irreverent, Silkworm’s Pansori scours archives of history, family, and desire nestled within each other like Matryoshka dolls. Borders blur in Seung’s poems as the footnote in “Crockpot Desire” becomes its own poem—a litany of “I wants”—or the titles in a cycle of sijo blend seamlessly into new bodies. These inventive works marry tradition and innovation, dancing between forms and eras like the silkworm they evoke in endless reincarnations. Seung’s poems sing with exquisite lyricism, bite with irony, and spin with tenderness. —Arah Ko
“Inheritance is everything you don’t decide” writes David Seung in his remarkably piercing and brilliant debut. These uncanny yet utterly precise permutations enact an insistence of becoming, an insistence against stagnancy, and an insistence of choice and reimagination. Mixing the inheritance of familial history with a sharp wit, these poems show how intimacy can be dependent on the straddling of distance—a gravitation away is also an orientation towards—and though inheritance isn’t a choice, the ability to imagine other kinds of agency is. —Janice Lee
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JANICE LEE (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction, & poetry: KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), Daughter (Jaded Ibis, 2011), Damnation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Reconsolidation (Penny-Ante Editions, 2015), The Sky Isn’t Blue (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016), Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). An essay (co-authored with Jared Woodland) is featured in the recently released 4K restoration of Sátántangó (dir. Béla Tarr) from Arbelos Films.
She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy?
Her next book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of the Korean myth of Princess Bari.
Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, and facilitates guided meditations, especially as a practitioner of Engaged Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh) and an aspirant for the Order of Interbeing. She also incorporates elements of ancestor work, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), traditional Korean folk practices, plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication.
She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University.