Ishle Yi Park gives exacting performance

Ishle Yi Park knows how to pause. She knows how to enunciate her words and tap into the flow of her own language. Her style is reminiscent of other New York poets and slam fiends, garnished by theatrics and a lot of hand motions. This style would be expected of a Def Poetry Jam poet, and maybe of the Poet Laureate of Queens, N.Y. Park is both.\nShe was projecting Monday night from Whittenberger Auditorium for an audience of about 60 people, many of them sharing her Korean heritage. Union Board brought her to this Bloomington venue partly to recognize Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Union Board outreach director Kenn Cooper said during his introduction of Park. That afternoon, Park also offered a poetry workshop.\nPark, in pigtails and hoop earrings, recited most of her poetry from memory, at times descending from the stage for effect.\nHer performance, at least for that night, focused on the experience of Koreans and Asian Americans in general. Most of it was softly political rather than angry, encapsulating memories and offering heavy descriptions of events.\nMost of her work is written from a second- or third-person perspective, as if she sought to distance herself from her inspiration. \nThe pieces stemming from her experiences were among the best. In one piece she described a race war between blacks and Koreans that culminated in a fire within a Korean neighborhood in New York. Her voice assumed the sentiments behind the Korean outcry about this event and at least partially masked her own voice. \nIn another powerful piece titled "Open Letter to Military Wives," she represented women who were losing their men in the Iraq war. The piece's lack of run-of-the-mill political anger increased its power. Although the poem's metaphorical nature meant to hide Park's fear of losing her past military boyfriend behind the strong emotions of the military wives, the audience was left wondering what Park would have said if she had embraced the personal quality of her situation more directly.\nToward the middle of the nearly hour-long performance, she read a few newer love poems that dodged cliché effectively. For these pieces, her performance assumed a more staid expression because she read them from the page. In many ways, this muted style was just as agreeable, if not more so, as her other pieces, which clearly were meant for use at slams and teetered on the edge of being overperformed in some parts.\nMuch of her performance was calculated, almost mathematical; she was very exacting with language and projection, as if she had sought to add the emotion in later and stir. The big picture of her pieces was memorable, which is a hard-won accomplishment for many spoken-word poets. \nAt the end she sang a well-crafted song she had written for her friends for their non-legally binding wedding. For more information about Park, visit her Web site at www.ishle.com.