Don Mee Choi, _DMZ Colony_

 A CASE IN point regarding the point that came up in the Baudelaire post of a few days ago, viz., poetry not being the same as verse. DMZ Colony won the National Book Award for poetry, which makes for a convincing institutional affirmation that yes, this is poetry. But there is no regular verse here, and only some free verse; most of the book, typographically, is in prose. 

Nor is the prose particularly lyrical or imagistic or cadenced or any of the qualities that lead to prose being called "poetic." A good many pages simply presents phrases from an interview with Ahn Hak-sop, a political prisoner and victim of torture in South Korea. One section is the invented testimony of some of the children killed in Sancheong-Hamyang massacres of 1951. There are prose passages about journalists like Choi's father, who tried to report on and document the brutal methods of some of South Korea's series of dictatorial regimes. Complementing the text are a variety of photographs and drawings.

We are very far from anything a reader who pre-dated Baudelaire would call poetry, then (to say nothing of a good many who post-date him). But there is no other obvious thing to call it. It has elements of memoir, of documentary, of fiction, as well as some pages of familiar (i.e., lineated) poetry. The pictorial elements are integral rather than illustrative--they need to be there. So what is that? As with Cha's Dictée, one might hesitate to call it poetry, but one is stuck for what else to call it. 

So is "poetry" now not only what looks and sounds like poetry, but also large tracts of the unclassifiable and unnameable?

It's an unforgettable book. Set this alongside Han Kang's novels The Vegetarian and Human Acts and Cathy Park Hong's Dance Dance Revolution and you get a quite different idea of South Korea than you are going to get from images of Gangnam or from BTS.