What exactly is the common note shared by a rounded wall and the phrase, "You wouldn't"? Is it the shape of an echo? Is it the color of shadow that pools in the rounded portion? Perhaps it involves whatever the rounded wall hears when you, the person speaking the poem, are wailing about poisons. And curses. What’s a wall supposed to say to all that toxicity. “You wouldn’t.” It echoes. Or would you?
For Kim Hyesoon’s poem, “In Front of a Rounded Wall,” she proposes a ladder of gestures that feel the same as you hearing your curses echoed back at you. Or at least that’s what the hinge line starting the last stanza proposes. “in this way / … / I to you / throw curses.” “You wouldn’t” has a tone that I think is like any one of these gesture. “I wouldn’t,” for instance, fly a bird. If I did, it would inevitably embed into me. If I were to send love anywhere, I would not expect my beloved’s wrists to be what the world returned to sender.
I’ve always appreciated the involvedSurreal moments Hyesoon involves in her poems. It’s like the debate about what surrealism is compared to “magical thinking” compared to the reasonableness of ridiculous thinking. Whatever lens would be used to describe what Hyesoon is doing, I would prefer thinking of it as magical logic. Logic like this doesn’t depend on reality. This logic is a game arranging circumstances into what can’t not be called logic. It’s rationalism that requires an active imagination for validation. An if→then that will connect, so long as your mind is playful enough.
But there is a not enough quality to Hyesoon’s surrealism in this poem. She explains that if she were to fly a bird, it would fly away. But what is it to “fly a bird”? I imagine the poet holding a bird like a paper airplane, and she flies it. I could also see the poet mounting the bird so she flies it. Significantly, though, the poem is more concerned with moving along. It’s barely concerned with the “then” of the if→then proposition. And yet both “if” and “then” are weird things to consider. Meaning, they’re memorable for their unusualness. If I’m not sure what’s meant by flying a bird, I’m also not sure what it might mean for the bird to “embed into me.” Is it merely the memory of the bird? Could “embed” also be considered “embodied”? Would the use of “embed” indicate a more inextricable attachment to the poet?
The poem is laced with these involved ambiguities. I would say these surreal gestures are one of the main mechanisms to the poem. And given the ladder of surreal gestures, it makes me think of the poet throwing curses at a curved wall only to have them returned to her. Is there an if→then to throwing a curse only to have it echoed back? Is there something implicit about what it means to hear your curse echoed back, like maybe the echo transforms the original curse? The poem doesn’t make clear whether it intends each of the surreal gestures to be read in parallel to the cursing at the end. After all, the curse is thrown out, “And then / quickly I hold the poison bowl.” What happens in that “and then”? Maybe something that I would personally have cautioned the poet against. “I wouldn’t.” I’d say.