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Hangul Abecedarian

Franny Choi

Gathering sounds from each provincial
Nook and hilly village, the scholars
Discerned differences between
Long and short vowels, which phonemes,
Mumbled or dipthonged, would become
Brethren, linguistically speaking.
Speaking of taxonomy,
I’ve been busy categorizing what’s
Joseon, what’s American about each
Choice of diction or hill I might die on.
Killing my accent was only ever half the
Task, is what I mean. Q: When grief
Pushes its wet moons from me, is the sound
Historically accurate? or just a bit of feedback?

Franny Choi is the author of three poetry collections, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022) ; Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019); and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014).

Themes

About this Poem

“This poem is part of a series that takes the abecedarian form (in which each line begins with another letter of the alphabet) and adapts it to Hangul, the Korean alphabet. As a child in weekend Korean school, I learned about how Hangul was developed by King Sejong in the 15th Century—but it wasn't until recently that I started to think about what might have been lost in that process of standardization. This poem, like many in the series, is an attempt to approach and learn from the gulfs between languages.”

—Franny Choi

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More by this poet

Time-Sensitive

^{“When did the ‘present’ begin?”

—Lauren Berlant}

When the tyrant’s voice comes on the car radio, I close my eyes in an effort to slow the rate at which hopelessness enters me. With this act, I hurl myself faster toward extinction.

Every morning, I stretch, put food in my throat, and fail to forgive myself.

At night, I sit down to watch last year’s extinctions paint the wall, while next time’s fire buffers in a perpetual next time.

Franny Choi

2023

We Used Our Words We Used What Words We Had

we used our words we used what words we had

to weld, what words we had we wielded, kneeled,

we knelt. & wept we wrung the wet the sweat

we wracked our lips we rang for words to ward

off sleep to warn to want ourselves. to want

the earth we mouthed it wound our vowels until

it fit, in fits the earth we mounted roused

Franny Choi

2022

Quarantine

Because I did not have to smell the cow’s fear,
because I did not have to pin the man, watch his eyes
go feral, because I did not have to drag the stones
that formed in the child’s body, because I did not sheathe
my hands in dank soil, or skirt the machine’s battering, the needles
knitting my lower back, because when the factory collapsed

Franny Choi

2018

Poems

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Hangul Abecedarian

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