The Truth in Rented Rooms

Rating:
Summary: Tenant Laws - From The Raven Chronicles
Review:
The fantasy of self reliance doesn't just include the retreat to nature of Ralph Emerson or Ted Kosynski but it also includes the more urban counterparts of the bare bones existences lived out of a single room in a cheap hotel of Jesse Bernstein or Koon Woon; a plain trust of where they are right then despite the evidence that their current state of mind and health is not a permanent one and may come apart at any moment. Koon Woon's narrator lives in the temporary housing of an unstable mind. He organizes these poems In The Truth of Rented Room around International District dives'the names of which sound to me like vaguely familiar but exotic locales that a troubled cousin or family friend (some vague and distant acquaintance) may have lived in once but are familiar nonetheless as places where terminal failures end up like the layers of hell; Seventh Avenue South, the Morris, International Terrace, The Bush, and so have this downward appeal and even romance as places where you earn your way in with failure. This is the contemporary edge of that old, bad Seattle neighborhood, Skid Road, home to destitute madmen and hobos. And the poems in The Truth in Rented Rooms are mad poems. Mad because insanity is not mental illness or bipolar disorder or any vague and undefined malady that can be cured. Even normal people are possessed by madness but it is only contained and treated with the metal walkers of medication but it cannot be burned out of the body with radiation or dispelled with penicillin. Madness is an irrevocable state of being. Everyone has some access to the idea of madness and I'm not talking about the cartoon of Bugs Bunny's windwheel eyes but the real dead-weight that comes about in deep depression when the air because it is too wet and too cold takes too much effort to shovel into your lungs. And this isn't exactly Walden. In this wilderness holes have been burnt into the brain, bits chewed out cell by cell by whatever forces have rewired the synapses like the topography of a flooding river's sand bars and channels. The narrator of Koon Woon's poems has reconciled his state of being as something to live with like an independent element, wind and rain and whatever weather is going on inside his skull. These are not hopeful poems about recovery or conquering his condition. I found in these poems a broader acceptance of life's instability, heightened by the transient nature of the narrator's mind as well as his bed in rented rooms. This is self reliance not in the control of his environment but self-reliance in the acquiescence of control, which isn't giving-up, but is the art of getting by. In, 'I have argued my premise of isolation and sorrow: the world comes into the pallor of my room', Koon Woon writes:

It took 10 years and the destruction of
6' x 4' x 4 ' or 96 cubic feet of poetry and 10 years to make me feel better,
And I have now moved into a bigger room, room enough to blues the guitar,

Have now room for Nietszche and Immanual Kant on a corner bookshelf,
And now my phone calls someone and that somene calls someone and so on...



Rating:
Summary: Tenant Laws - From The Raven Chronicles
Review:
The fantasy of self reliance doesn�t just include the retreat to nature of Ralph Emerson or Ted Kosynski but it also includes the more urban counterparts of the bare bones existences lived out of a single room in a cheap hotel of Jesse Bernstein or Koon Woon; a plain trust of where they are right then despite the evidence that their current state of mind and health is not a permanent one and may come apart at any moment. Koon Woon�s narrator lives in the temporary housing of an unstable mind. He organizes these poems In The Truth of Rented Room around International District dives�the names of which sound to me like vaguely familiar but exotic locales that a troubled cousin or family friend (some vague and distant acquaintance) may have lived in once but are familiar nonetheless as places where terminal failures end up like the layers of hell; Seventh Avenue South, the Morris, International Terrace, The Bush, and so have this downward appeal and even romance as places where you earn your way in with failure. This is the contemporary edge of that old, bad Seattle neighborhood, Skid Road, home to destitute madmen and hobos. And the poems in The Truth in Rented Rooms are mad poems. Mad because insanity is not mental illness or bipolar disorder or any vague and undefined malady that can be cured. Even normal people are possessed by madness but it is only contained and treated with the metal walkers of medication but it cannot be burned out of the body with radiation or dispelled with penicillin. Madness is an irrevocable state of being. Everyone has some access to the idea of madness and I�m not talking about the cartoon of Bugs Bunny�s windwheel eyes but the real dead-weight that comes about in deep depression when the air because it is too wet and too cold takes too much effort to shovel into your lungs. And this isn�t exactly Walden. In this wilderness holes have been burnt into the brain, bits chewed out cell by cell by whatever forces have rewired the synapses like the topography of a flooding river�s sand bars and channels. The narrator of Koon Woon�s poems has reconciled his state of being as something to live with like an independent element, wind and rain and whatever weather is going on inside his skull. These are not hopeful poems about recovery or conquering his condition. I found in these poems a broader acceptance of life�s instability, heightened by the transient nature of the narrator�s mind as well as his bed in rented rooms. This is self reliance not in the control of his environment but self-reliance in the acquiescence of control, which isn�t giving-up, but is the art of getting by. In, �I have argued my premise of isolation and sorrow: the world comes into the pallor of my room�, Koon Woon writes:

It took 10 years and the destruction of
6� x 4� x 4 � or 96 cubic feet of poetry and 10 years to make me feel better,
And I have now moved into a bigger room, room enough to blues the guitar,

Have now room for Nietszche and Immanual Kant on a corner bookshelf,
And now my phone calls someone and that somene calls someone and so on...



Rating:
Summary: Wry, funny, and clear-eyed
Review: It's brave and lucid stuff, this book. This is the kind of poetry that can hold you together on a bad day.

I first learned about Koon Woon's poetry when he read at the annual meeting of the Washington State Tenants Union. If you ever have a chance to hear him read, be sure not to miss it. His delivery is natural, engaging, and free of that all-too-usual poetical pomposity.

Rating:
Summary: Debut collection introducing the poetic talents of Koon Woon
Review: The Truth In Rented Rooms is the debut collection introducing the poetic talents of Koon Woon. The poetry is drawn from the streets of Seattle's International District, to rural China, to outer space. Woon's verse arises from his battles with mental illness, his year of life on the streets, and the need for an outlet to express the feelings he was having to control during those times. The Woman In The Next Room: Has a craving for a banana/And is convinced I am a spy after her secret.//She's reading one of those paperback books where/The heroine leads a successful double life.//She works in a doctor's office/And she flies to Florida under a year to read//A book in this next hotel room/And is worried about the minimum upkeep of a spy/Which I am. I know she rinses her lettuce/Many times and she has a secret kept in a semi-/Precious gem box no one can see or open./She is slender and naked upon the hotel bed/Just reading while the potted ferns tremble/Because someone has closed a door down the hall.//We come to this hotel once a year and live/In two adjacent hotel rooms and I pretend//I don't know her and she wants me to call her/On the telephone and talk to her about stocks and real estate.