The Poetics of Place

Memory, architecture, literature and wandering infuse a collection of poetry about physical space and cultural location for research during an OFA Artist Development Fellowship.

By Isabella Cho '24

ADF Guest Blogger

Isabella Cho ’24, a resident of Pforzheimer House concentrating in English, was awarded an OFA Artist Development Fellowship to engage in research in both Allston and New York City leading to a full-length poetry collection exploring Korean American landscapes. She is a Central Administration reporter and film executive for The Harvard Crimson and serves on the executive boards of The Harvard Advocate and the Harvard Creative Writing Collective. A U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts and Pushcart Prize nominee, Cho has been recognized by YoungArts, Princeton University, the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, among others.

Ever since I was younger, I knew intuitively how foundational a physical sense of place was to the way I related to the world.

I realize, in retrospect, that it’s just the way I’m wired. When I think back to early childhood memories, of course, I remember the faces of those whom I love. But more forceful of a memory than what those individuals looked like or said to me is the encompassing, atmospheric reality of the built or natural landscape that surrounded us in those moments of union. In grade school, I would travel to South Korea frequently to visit my grandparents. I remember them vividly, but more so I recall the sprawling, nearly mythic countryside in which they resided: the countless stalks of corn, the knots of wild strawberries, the elemental fragrance of loam below the encircling mountains. When I visit them today, the same sensorial experience of physical place still rings true. 

As the years progressed, my fixation on physical place found a form of expression in an unlikely medium: poetry. I’ve always prized the genre for its dimensionality. If essays or fiction can be visualized as lines, with their prose often flowing in a streamlined direction, poetry feels to me more like a circle or a sphere. (Again, my spatial comprehension kicks in.) In poetry, negative space assumes a larger-than-life import, often becoming more telling than the words written on the page; through white space, writers can convey powerful sentiments of shock, outrage, breathlessness, wistfulness. The list goes on. Even the assembling of words on a page in poems holds resonant meaning. Rhyme, stanzas, couplets, tercets, iambic pentameter, capitalization, italics, enjambment — these are all vital parcels of information that reach out to a reader.

You might be asking how this all relates to my research at Harvard. During my sophomore year, I had the delight of taking a number of courses that challenged me to think critically about the relationship of poetry to physical space. In an English seminar examining the relationship between literature and the law, I read a translated collection of poetry penned by detainees at Guantánamo Bay assembled by a pro-bono attorney who received bespoke permission from the Pentagon to take redacted files from the military base. Acutely aware of their embodied experiences of constriction, the detainees enact these limitations in their verse while appealing to sensations of boundlessness — God, the sky, the ocean, hymn, death — to counteract their material conditions. In a poetry collection assigned in my workshop last spring, an author used the 38th parallel that cleaves North and South Korea as a motif for the performance of boundaries. 

My goals for the summer of my Artist Development Fellowship were two-fold. I wanted to explore the relationship between physical space — whether that be expressed through natural or built landscapes, topography or architecture — and poetry both through academic scholarship and my own wanderings. Two texts were fundamental to the first endeavor. The first was French philosopher Gaston Bachelar’s lovely theoretical text The Poetics of Space, which seeks to connect the elusive yet visceral sensation of home-ness with more abstract experiences of dreaming and creation. The second was Yi Sang: Selected Works, a volume of translated poetry by the revolutionary Korean poet Yi Sang who lived during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea during the early 20th century. First trained as an architect under the Japanese regime, Yi infused a deep spatial sensibility into his poetry — poetry which often grappled with anxieties of constriction and grotesque transformation, themes which were an apt reflection of the socio-political convulsions of his time.

My second goal for the summer – wandering – likely sounds vague. Part of that was by design. I wanted to use the fellowship as an opportunity to pair my more principled, theoretical foray into the role of spatiality in poetry with my own embodied experiences of travel and discovery. Though I was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the majority of the summer, I visited New York City over the weekends to immerse myself in a location where architecture and built space convey powerful vestiges of history, transformation, and difference. Of course, the same can be said of most places; however, I was particularly drawn to New York City because of its robust Koreatown. Yi’s spatially animated poetry and Bachelard’s theoretical conceptions of space took on new life as I traversed the technicolor alleys of Koreatown, an area animated by the kinetic throngs of passerby and the incessant flow of language.

I took the time to turn inward as well, producing a collection of poems that probed the critical relation between physical space and cultural location in New York City’s Koreatown. The collection served as a sort of hybrid of and homage to the two literary genres that have meant the most to be during my undergraduate years at Harvard: poetry and journalism. Though I wrote in verse during those nights in New York, a journalistic spirit undergirded my poetic process. Everywhere I turned, I encountered fragments of conversation and glimpses into rich, enigmatic histories; the journalist inside me had a hard time turning away from troves of information, and I leaned into them as I pieced together the collection, drawing phonetically, visually, tactically and linguistically from the built environment around me for inspiration and vision.

Ultimately, it is my hope that the work I conducted is just a starting point to a continual process of discovery and reflection. As I established earlier, physical places are the foci through which I conceptualize and navigate the world. Through leaning into this practice, I hope to become not just a more proficient literary scholar, but also a more perceptive and adventurous human being.