Commentary on the Birds
An Interview with Jed Munson
I was in the Philippines when I read Commentary on the Birds. The joy I felt of returning home, to my birthplace, was fleeting at best. There was something else brewing within me, a feeling I couldn’t put into words. I had memories of living there, an old school ID that established my loosening ties to what should’ve been my home, yet I filed into the foreigners line at immigration, with my blue passport in hand, unable to navigate without my sister and the Tagalog she could speak. Everyone could tell I was different, or maybe that was my own projection. But I felt that speaking would cast me to the outskirts of belonging. So I was silent, blending in as much as I could, but I felt like an intruder, occupying a forbidden space granted to only those who were raised in the country and culture, whose tongues could take the shape of the language. How could I have strayed so far from the boy in my memory that lived here? While my experience returning home is no doubt different from Jed Munson’s time as a Fulbright Scholar exploring the ecology of the DMZ, his collection felt like a gift that gave me the words to articulate the loss and irony I felt. From the spiraling flight paths of cranes in the DMZ that cross fatal borders, to his reflections on his identity as a Korean American all combined with artwork, images, illness, trails, throughlines, and K-Dramas I couldn’t stop reading. This collection is rich. I found myself returning to it again and again, moving like a crane in an outward spiral. I had the fortune of corresponding with Jed Munson about Commentary through email.
CY: When did you begin taking interest in cranes and their migratory cycle? Did it come from a desire to research the DMZ?
JM: The chicken or the egg! Cranes were residents of the space that is the DMZ before the DMZ was there, but it was the DMZ that first framed the cranes as an interest to me. Eventually, this dialectic emerged where I was chasing the cranes to get “into” the DMZ but the cranes as subjects—in real life and in literature—were leading me elsewhere, digressing or widening the scope of my attention such that the DMZ was as if receding while the cranes became more and more vivid and identifiable. But also the DMZ was in this way, through ellipses, itself being reframed into a greater perspective, a global context, that heightened my sense of it as a spectral presence in everything I was chasing.
CY: I found myself especially fascinated by the idea of the DMZ as a simulacrum, a “false-floored stage on which certain visions of a unified Korea ironically depend.” At once a paradox and a container for paradox, an ecological paradise littered with landmines, a divider and a symbol of division, its literal and semiotic meanings ironic and paradoxical. How did your thinking about the possibility of witnessing something conceptual or forbidden—the possibility of conceiving of a place barred from perception—change as you wrote this collection?
JM: I think what interested me about this impossibility of witness with respect to the DMZ was the sense that it was actually revealing something fundamental about the limits of witnessing anything. Or at least the question of its possibility. My relationship to this question changed as I wrote about it and the DMZ because I found myself maybe inevitably trying to witness things, I had considered formerly impossible to approach, like so-called personal writing, my family. If the DMZ could be imagined despite degrees of displacement, maybe I could also look at/into other forbidden zones in myself through acts of literary imagination.
CY: Can you talk about what it means for you to speak from the “chest voice,” and what it makes possible for you?
JM: Maybe the chest voice is a kind of forbidden, or at least contested, zone for me. I think I was thinking about the notion of “dropping in” to one’s self (the way Yun Seri plunks into the DMZ in Crash Landing On You), about embodiment—big ideas that bother or worry me intellectually and poetically—and found this description apt. I can’t remember where I heard it first but I’m sure it’s in some book or interview, some writer observing that second or acquired tongues sound from the skull, as if from the brain, whereas a native tongue sounds from the chest, from a deeper cavity. I’m remixing my memory of the sentiment, sorry to whoever thought of it first. And another aspect of it is probably that game where you lay on your back, and someone presses your belly and whatever sound you make is your “real laugh”—I feel like when you’re lying flat on your back and talking it sounds softer and bigger. What makes this voice possible for me in a literary sense are environments where I’m postured like that, turned to the sky or something proportionately omnipresent and beyond presence.
CY: I noticed the intertextuality of your essays, how you drew upon visual and literary work, and found myself enthusiastically following a trail of your descriptions and inspirations. Was there other work that influenced you as you wrote this collection, that didn’t make it into the book? What led you to the decision to include photographs alongside writing about art?
JM: So many, truly. It’s interesting to me still how much slipped away and how suddenly what got included got included. Paul Yoon’s short story collection Once the Shore showed up in very early attempts at this in a meaningfully tangential way. There was of course a lot of learning about the basic facts and histories about the DMZ that launched me into my eventual pieces. I can also say that there’s a lot of art and writing about the DMZ that was coming to my attention around the time that I was writing. Obviously, Choi’s DMZ Colony was a catalyst. It liberated me, really, let me feel like I could say the next thing, my own small thing, poetically. Of course the Real DMZ Project has a whole archive of visual art. It’s really impressive. Duke UP came out with a book by scholar Eleana J. Kim, Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ, in 2022. DMZ literature is a rich corner of the thinking world.
CY: I believe that “Love in the DMZ” was the first essay published in the collection. Did that essay form the foundation of your collection from which the following essays drew inspiration? How did these essays come together over time?
JM: I guess it was the first to be published (thanks Full Stop!) and probably was the essay that made me realize I was composing a book, but I did write my undergrad thesis before that on the DMZ, and though the content of my thesis was entirely different, the spirit was very much the same, so it’s hard to say where the project or book began. It was like a continuous inquiry that showed its face in the form of these essays at a critical moment in my life, when I was confronted with the issue of producing proof of thought and research and yes, even care and creativity. Editing the essays, though, when I was back in New York the year after I drafted them in Seoul—that was what transformed them into a collection. They were in a totally different order at first, and I made some big cuts and overhauled essays with the help of my sister Olan, my teacher Erica Hunt, and my editor Hilary Plum.
CY: One of my favorite parts of the book was this passage:
When your project is organized around loss—when loss organizes you—when your whole imagined community is, there is no doneness, only gone’s glow. The grasp is just a motion in freeze-time. The gaps gape together. There’s no middle to balance along, just a medium to experience, the gesture towards the activity of searching, of 고민 revolving around absence. 고민: to suffer inside a heart, enclosed. To think hard. This starts to feel fleeting, like fleeing from the non-center, like uncentering, uncertainty, un-buckling-down, flight spiraling upwards, or like drilling for the center of the earth and finding huge air. Pure water. Gulps of strange old sounds you can’t read but can remember.
This passage prompted me to re-read the book through the lens of loss, tracing the path of “gone’s glow.” Can you expand on the relationship between this “goneness”, your biracial identity, uncertainty, artmaking, memory, and/or the DMZ?
JM: I’m so grateful for these questions and the reading they evidence and expand. Thank you. I feel like I will always be mourning and beholding my Koreanness as a thing just out of reach. My Americanness, too, whatever it is, does not feel like it belongs to me. I don’t know where to locate it or if it matters. English doesn’t feel like it’s mine, though I am in it. I feel like I’m swimming in this strange substance when I use English, even if I use it with native capacity, and I don’t particularly love that feeling or description. Korean is supposed to be the strange substance, right?, which is the strangest thing about it, that it doesn’t estrange me so much as it draws me in because this alienation is familiar, I am the detached thing from the words from the start, I have always been, I am only ever realizing I like being around words I don’t understand, closer to their sonic values. Am I poeticizing disfluency? Am I surviving my own disfluency through poetics? Is there a difference? My Korean is pretty standard heritage stuff, like 80% there on a good day in the living room, 60% around strangers, so functional/relational but not academic or literary really—and yet on most days, it’s as if my Korean lacks enough to feel vibrant when it’s there: somehow the nearly possible feels more real to me than anything proven or assumed. There are days where I desire no language or nation or any of those terms. There are days when I realize we will just have to make our own culture and our own world in order to live, and that’s honestly as devastating to me as it is inspiring.
CY: I sensed a desire to locate home and reclaim a part of yourself through researching and understanding the DMZ. Immediately I thought of the memories about your mother and father, their physical pain, your migraines, visual auras and connected it to your inability to claim the “right to feel the violence of loss, to participate in grief” since you are exempt from the rite of passage, from locating your Han. Do you think it’s possible to “serve time on the border” through writing?
JM: I should say outright I don’t think writing is at all the same thing as serving in the military, as much as I wish the book could count as national service for the purposes of, say, getting Korean citizenship! But I was writing at a time when I was around military age, my cousins were all going, and it’s this whole thing in Korea, a thing that structures Korean masculinity—a way guys measure themselves and definitely a point of differentiation for Koreans residing abroad: If you were born in Korea but moved away, whether or not you relinquish your citizenship in a lot of cases comes down to whether or not you want to go back to serve. I wanted to address this as a part of being Korean American and coming of age and learning about geopolitical destiny. I felt like I had to put my mind there, on the border—out of anxiety at first—but eventually, it became a search for an intellectual and artistic habitat.
CY: Do you have any projects you’re working on now? Do you plan on returning to the DMZ/CCZ?
JM: I write poems whenever I can and am wading through a handful of other beginnings right now. One of the delights of having Commentary in the world is that it reminds me that these things take their time, with or without me. I felt lost for pretty much the entirety of the process of writing and editing this book, and I don’t know that that will change with what comes next. I’m just finally starting to recognize that it doesn’t have to change for me to keep trying.
I definitely want to go back to the DMZ/CCZ because I didn’t get to do any of those classic tours where they take you around in a bus (because of COVID) and I’m admittedly curious about that experience. So that is probably in my future. That said, I’m someone who is not entirely sure who I will be by next Tuesday evening. I’m forever saying I’ll get back to you, I’ll circle back to this.
Jed Munson grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. His poetry chapbooks include Minesweeper (New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM, 2023), Silts (above/ground press, 2022), and Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021).