I got a little nervous when I saw Don Mee Choi standing next to a small band onstage at Hugo House last September. I knew Choi primarily as a Korean-born, Hong Kong–raised, Seattle poet/translator who often uses puns and funny/grotesque imagery to deconstruct English and the colonial ideologies fossilized therein. I didn’t know she had a band.
Typically, whenever I see a live band and a poet sharing the same stage, I make sure to locate my nearest emergency exit. The live band + poet combo almost never works. But once Choi’s performance got going, my fears were quickly allayed. The drummer, Jay Weaver, and the bass player/composer, Doug Lilla, produced an ambient, haunting sound that enhanced the power of the black-and-white war photography projected behind them. The photos were taken by Choi’s father, who spent much of her childhood in Vietnam filming the war…
