Notice its structure, the opening words scattered across the page, followed by four stanzas (those lines of the poem that are grouped together). It looks simple, but looks can be deceiving. Read the scattered words aloud, taking note of how you have to pause in your reading as your eyes move from one number to find the next. Note the randomness of their arrangement on the page. Poetry captures emotion and meaning using few words, but those few words are very carefully selected, as is the structure and punctuation of a poem. Focus on the title of the poem. What does it tell you about the poem? Someone is telling someone else the news of the shooting. Think about the opening words of the poem. What do they suggest? What was the poet's intention in scattering these words across the page? Read the poem out loud more than once, alone or with a listener. Include the title of the poem in your reading and pay close attention to punctuation—pause for commas, pause longer at periods. Like music, poetry may have rhyme. It also usually has rhythm, and reading it out loud makes these musical elements more obvious. A poem has a speaker (the voice relating the poem) who may be different from the poet. "They Shot Wook Kim" is a narrative poem, which means it tells a story. Who is telling this story? Who is the speaker in this poem? It's someone who knew Wook Kim by name, knew some of his history and what he longed for—love. Wook Kim worked at the Texaco down the boulevard. Perhaps a neighbor is telling another neighbor of the crime. What is the speaker's tone? Humorous? Somber? Mixed? Does the speaker of the poem know Wook Kim? How might the speaker know him?Listen to the poem being read aloud as you follow along with the text.The order of events in the poem adds to its meaning. Edelman's poem begins with its climax, the shooting of Wook Kim. The poem then works backwards, describing Wook Kim's hopes, dreams, and love life. In this way, Wook Kim appears first as a nameless, faceless victim, then as a more real, more fully fleshed-out human being. By structuring his poem this way, Edelman is able to immediately pique his readers' interest and pull them into the poem; then he is able to encourage them to sympathize with Wook Kim. Readers who pay close attention to the text find the literal narrative of the poem—a Korean man who works in a gas station is shot eight times for thirty dollars. This man left his native country, leaving behind those he loved to make a new life near his brother in a culture he often did not understand. He had not yet found love here, but he had hopes of finding it. He also had humor, often laughing at himself and his new life. In narrative poetry, structure, punctuation, tone, and story are the outer layer of the poem. But to truly understand and appreciate the poem, the reader must go deeper, looking at things like figurative language, the connotative meanings of specific words, and the various literary techniques the poet has chosen to use. For example, poets often use sound devices such as rhythm and alliteration to add to a poem's impact. Each of these is found in this poem. Edelman is using a metaphor when he compares the gas station to a morgue with the phrase "petroleum morgue." Clearly, a gas station is not literally a morgue, and a morgue is not made of petroleum, but the figurative language drives home the reality that a death has occurred here; now the gas station has become a kind of morgue. A second poetic device used by Edelman is irony. This difference between appearance and reality is found in the line "Perhaps, she's just around the corner ..." The speaker of the poem is referring to Wook Kim's expectation of finding a "special love," but what was actually around the corner for the Korean immigrant was death. Connotative meaning—meaning beyond a word's literal or denotative meaning—is commonly found in poetry. Words in poetry are few and loaded with both emotional impact and associations beyond their dictionary meanings. Reread these lines with that in mind:
For man is always
At the mercy of other men,
Sentenced by the absence of laughter and love,
All the race has to give.
The literal or denotative meaning of the word sentenced is "the finding by a court of law as to the punishment to be given a person found guilty in a trial." Someone commits a crime, is tried, found guilty, then told how they will be punished. This is a fairly straightforward example, but consider the associations of these words. They are legal words and imply fairness and procedures to protect those charged with crimes. But Wook Kim found no fairness. He was sentenced to death, not for something he did but because of the absence of something in those who sentenced him—an absence of laughter and love, of human kindness, "all the race has to give." A tragic result is that an innocent man was killed by criminals. He had no recourse in law or with humanity.
