Still, Observing: On Christine Kwon’s “A Ribbon The Most Perfect Blue”
Christine Kwon | A Ribbon The Most Perfect Blue | Southeast Missouri State University Press | March 2023 | 76 Pages
Reframing the domestic, Christine Kwon writes a new history of women’s work in A Ribbon The Most Perfect Blue. Across this debut collection, Kwon describes a world in which women labor in pursuit of pleasure—an endeavor that often involves concentrated passivity. “I’m lying in bed / with a stained mouth / adorning myself / with flowers / and their names,” she writes in “Big Picture,” and indeed, these poems continuously present some combination of leisure and stillness as a viable, aspirational mode of existence. Though traditional forms of work are alluded to—babysitting children, writing, manning the checkout line at the grocery store—“to write poems I had to stay home doing nothing / Listen to a pair of wings flicking,” Kwon writes. Being a poet becomes a form of being, a form of womanhood, a form of work.
Kwon explores this poet identity in “Affirmations” through her speaker’s reference to a lineage of canonical poets and writers—Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, George Eliot, Louise Glück, Claudia Rankine—as a mechanism to upend her relationship with their work: “I decide I don’t want to be like Emily / (Dickinson) / And wait for my sister-in-law to publish / my treasure trove after I die / My sisters-in-law are the athletic type,” she tells us. Depending on others isn’t useful; Kwon’s speaker, unlike Dickinson, takes her career into her own hands. Kwon is interested in the performance of identity while constantly disrupting these forms of categorization. “The spiritual idea that appeals to me / is the Buddhist ideal / that you are nothing regarding the nothing that is and the / nothing that isn’t,” her speaker explains, pairing this idea of ego destruction with an image of herself, looking at herself and not recognizing what she sees: “Looking at an old photo of myself / I am surprised / I ever looked that way / Looking in the mirror / I am surprised / I ever looked that way / Is that what living is.” The speaker is a poet, in the tradition of these formidable poets, but she is also someone different, her own self, maybe a nobody. Echoes of Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody! Who are you?” ring through moments of this poem, underscoring how for this speaker, tension lies in the balance of being like what came before and making the self anew. In these poems, the appearance of something rarely shapes the way things are.
Indeed, there’s a polymorphic quality to the speaker, an “I” who can slip inside rooms without being noticed. At the party described in this poem, the white crowd talks about race “(why not)” and the speaker is reminded of a similar scene in Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, in which a dinner party of “polite white people” discusses race. Rankine—the sole Black person in attendance— reflects on the ways their discussion elides contextual histories of racism in America, but refrains from jumping in to educate the group. “Knowing that my silence is active in the room, I stay silent because I want to make a point of that silence,” Rankine writes. Similarly, in “Affirmations” the speaker remains silent. “The one thing I couldn’t stand / I say / is someone like me / badly paraphrasing Claudia Rankine,” she tells her therapist. The apophasis is funny—another affirmation, another contradiction—while also serving as a reminder of the constraints placed on this speaker. But Kwon, building on Rankine’s articulation of the active power of silence, shows how poetry allows one to slither through these strictures; in the space of the poem, things can go both said and unsaid at once.
Commentary slides in through side doors, through juxtaposition, through renderings of desire and agency, not just in the contrast between the actions of the speaker and the other party guests in “Affirmations,” but also in the portrayal of the cast of characters in “The Blue Feast.” In this complementary poem about a party, Mina Loy has an FFM threesome, Kim Hyesoon draws a bath, Yi Sang smokes a cigarette indoors, and William Carlos Williams strokes a cat. These poets are pursuing pleasure: “It’s a wonderful party.” In contrast with the dismal festivity of “Affirmations,” “The Blue Feast” presents unadulterated joy.
But the forms of these two party poems are similarly unmoored and unmetered, similarly pleasurable in their sprawl, even as the speaker expresses dissatisfaction with events going on around her. Both use form to make jokes—to make, quite literally, fun. And both use the heft that accompanies the names of well-known poets as a site of play. The parenthetical naming in “Affirmations”—“(George) Eliot”; “Emily (Dickinson)”; “(Wallace) Stevens”—serves as an amusing technique to remind the reader of the wealth of similarly named writers in the canon. “The Blue Feast” picks back up this “name-dropping” mode, moving back and forth across the page, stopping and starting, presenting a catalogue, akin to a Page Six write-up of the most enviable poetry blow out bash. The speaker occupies the role of host at this party, and also of chronicler. At the end, the poem devolves into a litany of grievances; the short lines indented on the page embody the bathroom line, the stoppage mirroring the frustrated hitch of being held up at party, bladder bursting, only to hear someone behind the door, luxuriating in the bath:
while the younger crowd huddles in the hallway
in line for the bathroom
their teeth chatter
their bladders bursting
weakened by discomfort
into terse
statements
which can only be
heard as
complaints
except now Ms. Kim Hyesoon is
bathing,
we can all hear her splash.
The pleasure in that final line! It sploshes on the page. Kwon moves us in this dense swatch of lines from anxiety to glee. And it does not seem coincidental that Hyesoon is a contemporary female Korean poet. I glean a winking reminder of an identifying link via the modification of Hyesoon’s name: “Ms.” both confers the speaker’s respect and draws a gentle underline beneath her identity as a fellow female poet. It might, too, indicate the ambition of the speaker (and perhaps the poet) to be referred to with such deference for her own description and enactment of delight.
By the end of “The Blue Feast,” I feel I get the speaker’s role at parties, among other poets: to observe, to consider, to take action only when absolutely necessary. It’s powerful when this inaction is a choice; it’s devastating when silence is hoisted onto the speaker, when she is overlooked, rendered inert by conversation that ignores her humanity. But Kwon always remains in control of the story, of the words. They are tightly wound, particularly pointed, precisely unfurled. Even at rest, her speaker acts.
Kwon explores the relationship between people and objects—the ways people are rendered objects by the world and the ways they make themselves objects in response to it. “Father was a chair,” repeats the poem “Lazy Boy.” “I could not tell if he wanted to be more than a chair.” The speaker of A Ribbon, however, often has agency, and yet opts for immobility or passivity, with the exception of moments when she is caring for others. In “Le Friday” a day becomes an object, which becomes a baby, which becomes a flower. The speaker of the poem lays down, and then “lay[s] Friday down.” “[I] brush her hair / Hold her purring in my arms / Still she dies / [...] / And I lie reading,” Kwon writes. The act of caring for others is presented almost as futile—the objects of the speaker’s care seem to persist in their inertia regardless of her intervention. The speaker’s movement, and her manifest influence, instead arrives in the form of writing or speech. This is her power. In “Big Picture” the speaker seems to brag:
I was looking at cats
and everything
that a girl ate in a day
when a pretty girl
called to pick me up:
Oh no I can’t, I said,
I’m a champagne glass
on a windowsill
practicing stillness
There is an insistence to the art required of this stillness, this refusal to act, and the attention to quotidian detail it both enables and depends upon. This stillness requires practice, which this speaker catalogs, attests to, and also implements. Indeed, the form of the work often enacts this argument. In “Monday in City Park,” the sole concrete poem in the book, the word “wet” is repeated fifty-nine times, in regimented columns and rows, broken up by eighteen other words or phrases: “huge/stone,” “puddle,” “cloud,” “one/shoe.” This poem is tricky: at first glance it appears still, almost simple. However, on moving into individual lines of the poem, reading it word by word, slight deviations become momentous—“wet” is replaced by “dog,” “wet” is substituted for “tree,” “licking” hovers over “wind”—until a break from the visual form “[dry spot for a picnic]” crashes through the previous two vertical columns of text. This shift: how momentous. I ache to dash for that picnic spot, this rectangle bracketed out for a reader’s respite from the soaking city park. It is moments like these where I feel the work the poems are doing, the difficulty and effort required of the act of being still, thinking, observing. The poem articulates Kwon’s conception of the process required of being a poet—she must first depend on her eye for detail in order to create the circumstances necessary to watch, process, and render the world anew.
“I watch the weeds pop up / after spending days weeding / I could spend my life like this,” Kwon writes in “Flotsam and Fluorescent Splendor.” What does it mean to spend a life through writing? This collection is bookended by two rivers: the Styx and a river of the speaker’s imagination. “I saw a river once / so I can summon one,” she tells us, “because you’ve seen one once / and you remember.” Here Kwon provides instruction for how to read this collection. Motifs recur like wet trees in the park, like rivers, like horses. They are meant to inform their last iteration. Things remind me of other things, but only if I take the time to notice them. Only if I spend the time. Kwon proffers an argument that being in the world, observing, and writing about it is just as valuable as any other job, and valid too, as “women’s work.” “All The Witches” enacts this argument, casting the speaker’s friend who “tried at the other thing” but “is now a lawyer at the oldest firm in the world” against the speaker herself: “I can make the light put on dancing shoes, / beneath a ssssshhhing palm / I sit on the steps / writing poems on my phone / in a bikini top and boxers / […]trying at the other thing too.” A scene of pleasure once again swirls with stillness, writing, and is ultimately cut by something more sinister—the way our culture immortalizes women who die a premature death, while devaluing the living work of writing. “Precious friends! I’d like to tell them / god loves artists / They still burn at the stake— / smile and leap like a flame!” she writes. Kwon makes this work seem fun, but we are reminded that this fun is a form of survival. As with the rivers, on one side is death, whether literal or metaphoric, and on the other is the imagined possibility, potential.
The final poem, the titular “A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue,” sluices back and forth on the page, riverlike. It begins with the “I” who saw the river once, and then directly addresses the reader: “now you see / where I live / in some spotless / and.” The poem ends on this conjunction, inviting the work to continue beyond the page, in the reader’s mind. Should I be so lucky to live in a mind like Kwon’s, one that has spent so much time thinking about the world, one that is so good at seeing? Should I have the luck to live and to write in pursuit of hard-won pleasure? Or should I have the tenacity to persist living like this: “So many days of doing nothing / and a feeling going through.”