chiwan choi

Featured as Poet of the Week on Brooklyn Poets. 

But we kept watching, together. We were disappointed and angry, but we were also hopeful that he would grow up and find his way, because he was family, because his game was a way for us to find each other.

Now that he’s gone, we’ve lost a language that kept us bound to each other.

portraitures and erasures

it ends my sleep to want my story about my skin melting in the sun that day of summer and a doctor who tells me i am dying, that thing i hide under my nails like dirt scratched from summer skin.

so i pick up a pencil and begin to erase myself.

erasure is sometimes editing. immigration is always editing.

Chiwan Choi is a Los Angeles-based poet whose family left South Korea when he was 5 and eventually arrived in the United States. “The Yellow House” is a wide-ranging, book-length poem that roams through time, touching on family history, identity, the disruption of emigration, urban life, the loss of an unborn child and much else. As in the untitled section here, the poem continually brings the reader to ordinary scenes that, by means of an understated musicality, take on symbolic significance.

after

at best we will lose each other at something we have been taught to call the end.

CC: Do you think that as much as you were building a book you were also tearing something down?

JL: Are you familiar with the Winchester Mansion? We talked about the movie; if you like horror movies with a moral and pandering, it’s your type of movie. But I was interested in the Winchester Mansion since I was like eleven. Weird spaces that are illogical and don’t make sense have always attracted me, but they seemed logical to me! No, this is how things are! Sometimes you go up seventeen stairwells, and you’re out of breath, and there’s nothing there. It’s always fascinated me, like this is how some things are built.

This book is my Winchester. I just needed it to be accurate. I needed it to be a clockwork that failed.

Whiteness isn’t intellectualism. Whiteness isn’t indigenous. Whiteness isn’t anything.

After that second meeting I had with Tom Lutz, I got another email from the Executive Editor (or some grand shit like that) about wanting to publish a poem of mine.

Nah.

They want me to want something from them. They want me to take something from them. They want me to take what they are offering me. Here, they say, take this gift from us and be one of us. You will enjoy the garden inside these walls.

All they need is for me to want from them, of them. That’s all they need to erase me.

Poet and publisher Chiwan Choi had just finished a reading in Highland Park and was riding the bus back to his downtown L.A. apartment when something changed.

It was one of those picturesque days when the city seemed too perfect; the sky looked as if it had been painted by Rembrandt. Choi was excited, because the reading at Avenue 50 Studios had been packed, hinting at an epoch when poets were respected and idolized.

CATCHING A TRAIN—AND FRAGMENTS OF POETRY—AT UNION STATION

The series #90for90 was this summer’s iteration of DTLAB. It brought free literary and community events to Union Station for 90 consecutive nights, including that poetry reading with Walters on the 66th night. Through #90for90, we wanted to explore what happens to a community’s spirit, camaraderie, morale, and economy when we present art in an open and public space night after night.

A Year in Reading: Chiwan Choi

I can’t tell whether reading amazing books has made the historically shitty year less shitty or if reading these books has made me realize how shitty 2017 (lol this could be said about any year) really has been. Either way, it was a shitty year and there were amazing books and ultimately, reading them has always helped me remember I am alive.

"We moved into Koreatown. The first place we stayed was on Crenshaw and 8th. It was in the back house of someone my parents knew. We moved many, many times -- but always within like six blocks.

"My parents felt really comfortable in Koreatown because there were Korean billboards; the store signs were in Korean; there were Korean churches everywhere. For me, it was pretty traumatic. I couldn't fit in with Korean kids because they looked at me as an outsider. I couldn't fit in with American kids because I didn't speak English.

invited to dinner i take my place at the table across mother who waits for my fingers to uncurl

the emptiness of our sacrifice lifted by my hands above this love that tries to bind us to an old name that no longer knows the road home

SO SILENCE

But he is my father.

These are things I am not supposed to speak of:

                                                                                   Love. Fear. Touch.