Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Lucky Fish, winner of the Eric Hoffer Prize, and At the Drive-In Volcano, winner of the Balcones Prize. Her first book, Miracle Fruit, won the Tupelo Press Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. Her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized and have appeared or forthcoming in: American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, FIELD, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, and Tin House. Her writing has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in poetry. She is associate professor of English at SUNY-Fredonia where she was awarded a Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence. She lives in western New York with her husband and their two young sons.

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LR: Your first book, Miracle Fruit, won the 2003 Tupelo Press Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. Could you describe the journey that Miracle Fruit took from birth to publication?

AN: A good third of it was from my thesis from The Ohio State University (my MFA is also in creative non-fiction) but I had a magical and productive year as a poetry fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing in Madison and that allowed me the time and resources to write the rest of it. I queried a few publishers directly and received lots of positive feedback so I decided to try my hand in two contests—one of them was, at the time, a relatively new press—Tupelo Press—and I about fainted when I got the email that Greg Orr selected my book as the eventual winner that year. I hadn’t even completely unpacked yet. I was twenty-six and had just moved to western NY for my first year teaching at SUNY-Fredonia.

LR: Your poetry often uses fanciful imagery and direct tones of address (as in “First Anniversary, With Monkeys” and “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?”) to relay moments of intimacy and elements of personal experience. What kind of poetic decisions do you find yourself making when you work with autobiographical subject matter?

AN: I try not to bore myself. And talking solely about myself bores me. And I admittedly have a relatively short attention span. And I’m always thinking of two or three things at once when I write. So, the trick for me is to be able to type or write as fast as the images leap in my head. I know I’m onto something if a metaphor startles or surprises me—I’ll try to hang on and follow that golden thread for as long as it will let me. I believe in an underworld littered with gems. In another life, I have to.

LR: It seems that every poet of color has a unique approach to the problem of how—or even whether—to address questions of identity in their writing. What strategies of craft do you employ when your writing touches on the subject of identity?

AN: Teeth brought me into being. At night, my teeth grow long, and by day, they shrink into little sets of dice. And sometimes I hear a man singing. In other words, I never set out to write poems about “identity.” I just write and sometimes it comes up, sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay too. The unpardonable sin for poets is to bore the reader. I can’t sing worth anything (though that doesn’t stop me when I’m in the car or shower!) but I think I have a pretty good ear for sound and music in a poem and so when I am revising, I’m often mumbling and reading out loud, sussing out the right sounds for each line and where the linebreaks should be. But I do that with virtually all of my poems.

LR: Your latest book, Lucky Fish, borrows much of its language and imagery from the natural world, which I imagine must have required a good deal of research. Can you describe for us how you discovered your source material and how you chose what elements to draw from for your poems?

LUCKY FISH

AN: Well, the not-so-dirty little secret is that I read way more science and nature books than I do poetry. I mean, reading a field guide about shells in the Pacific Ocean, for example, is my idea of a really good time. Kidding! (Sort of). So source material is never lacking per se, but when I’m drafting a poem, it’s because I have an image or a line that I can’t get out of my head and I start ‘sketching’ that out and from there, the image or line spirals outward until I have a lyric stanza or narrative growing from there. I’m drawn to images from nature that highlight a strange or arresting bit of beauty (or even terror) in an unexpected landscape.

LR: Parenthood is a theme that emerges strongly and frequently in Lucky Fish. In what ways does being a parent serve as a particular source of inspiration for you as a poet?

AN: I’m writing this fresh from a night when my youngest woke in the middle of the night wanting to inexplicably play! and play! and I’m running on about 3–4 hours of sleep, so right now SLEEP is my biggest source of inspiration. Oh, sweet, sweet sleep! But in all seriousness, becoming a mom has brought my heartbeat closer to the surface of my skin—I empathize with others in ways where I would easily look the other way, out of sight out of mind. News reports of violence towards children or kids committing suicide because they’d been bullied haunt me and trouble me at night, but before I had kids, I could just shut off the news and just forget the awful stories. But I think I also love more and have more patience in ways that I know I didn’t before I had kids. And I feel more of a fervent (and perhaps a bit of an earnest) push to record it all, to get it all on the page for my boys as a way to give them a document and record of sort—how much their mother loved this planet and its inhabitants, and ultimately, how much I love them.

LR: Despite the fact that formal poetry has fallen out of vogue, you often experiment with form in your work. What is it about form that interests you?

AN: I think formal poetry is very much alive and prospering, actually. In all levels of creative writing classes I teach—from beginning to advanced—I make sure to teach at least 4–5 types of formal poetry forms because I think there is much to be gained from exercising your brain in that way. Like cross-training in fitness. Like assembling one of those thousand-piece puzzle sets. I love the strategic architectures of sound and image that get created in formal poems.

LR: You have spoken about writing from a place of joy. How does this affect you on a practical level? Does it affect your perception of other poets’ work (i.e., is there such a thing as ‘reading with joy,’ too)?

AN: Great question! I do read with an eye towards joy and finding beauty in unexpected places. But that doesn’t mean I can’t or don’t want to read about darkness, about solemn and sad moments in history, for example. Mostly I read to learn something I didn’t know (or to remember something I forgot I once knew) or to be surprised or delighted with the word. I read to discover something new about my fellow human beings and to imagine a life/lives different than my own.

LR: Can you describe your writing process for us—perhaps by walking us through the inception and shaping of a favorite poem that you’ve written recently?

AN: It’s nearly impossible to trace my process of drafting a poem, but I can tell you that I was watching a nature special about penguins with my almost 5-year-old a few months ago, and the camera just zoomed in on this one singular penguin for what seemed like an inordinate amount of time, no narration. Beautiful. So after I put my son to bed, it got me thinking—What exactly does a papa penguin register in a nighttime that lasts two whole months? During those days of no sun, does he remember the particular bend of his mate’s neck, what hint of yellow near her ears? Or does he hunger for a slip of hooked squid, worry about the grand gulp of air he must take, the concentration needed to slow down his own heart to keep alive in the dark? I don’t know that any of that will work itself into a poem, but I know I took the time to scribble it into my little apple-green notebook so that maybe in 3–4 months or even years, I might come back to that image of male penguins waiting patiently in the Antarctic dark for their mates. But I can tell you that if and when that image appears in a poem, the poem won’t be “about” penguins—but the image or metaphor-making from that long penguin wait might pop up just when I (and hopefully, the reader) might least expect it.

LR: How do you think your poetry and your writing process have evolved over the course of your career so far?

AN: Poetry used to be such an insular experience for me. I mean, it still is, for the most part, just me and my notebook and eventually a computer screen, but I’m so much more aware and conscientious of being in a community of writers, whether that be my dear friends and former students from Kundiman, or other poets from around the world whose poetry I admire so much. And thanks to social media and the magic of the Internet, we can reach out to each other in ways that I hadn’t before. I love hearing good writing news from my friends and I am thrilled when a friend publishes a poem or a whole collection—it’s important for me to champion the work of others because so many people (who I’ve never even met) have done that for me. I always have loved writing letters and postcards, and still do, but I live in a tiny rural town just south of Buffalo, NY, and through email, I’ve also exchanged weekly or daily poems with a writing group of 5 poet-friends scattered all over the country. I can send drafts of work to trusted readers more efficiently and they can send work or whole manuscripts to me. But nothing, nothing beats the intimacy of getting “happy mail”—poems, postcards, and letters in my mailbox. How I love seeing my friends’ handwriting and a cancelled stamp.

LR: What has been your experience of teaching at Kundiman? Based on that experience, what is your impression of where Asian American poetry is right now and where it might be going?

AN: Is it ridiculous and cheesy to say it was a life-changing experience for me? Very well, then—I AM pretty corny and won’t apologize. But yes, yes, it’s all true: Life. Changing. The first time I was on the faculty, I had just returned from my honeymoon in St. Lucia and teaching at Kundiman was the first time I was going to be away from my husband for that long, so I had trepidations about being able to honor the spirit of closeness and being fully present for the students and staff, you know? But from the moment opening circle began on that first day, it truly was like I had found all of these long lost cousins—family I never knew I had. I actually wept when I left—so much love and open hearts and I witnessed such bravery and such talent and building up and support for their fellow writers. It was my experience as a member of the Kundiman faculty that helped shape what I now think of when I think about the word “community.” The giving back and support and encouragement to writers. My only regret is that I wish Kundiman was around when I was fresh out of college and never knew any other Asian-American poets in their 20s. That concept alone seems so ridiculous to me now. Of COURSE they are out there—but without the Internet, coupled with living in the suburbs of the midwest, I never knew that, and I had no one to tell me otherwise, so I often felt very isolated in that way. But I’m incredibly honored and grateful to help shape this effervescent time for Asian American poets—I think the poetry we are seeing now is ultra dynamic and fresh and loaded with a ton of heart. For just one example—so many students from my years with Kundiman have gone on to publish incredible books of poetry—I’m super psyched about books soon to come from Kundiman alums Matthew Olzmann, Tamiko Beyer, Brynn Saito, and Sharon Suzuki-Martinez, among others. And many more Kundiman alumni have gone on to organize literary events in their little corners of the world, building on that community experience and spiraling outward that love for the written and spoken word across the country.

LR: Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?

AN: I’m always drafting bits of poems, and now that the semester is done, I will be able to dig a bit deeper in some lyric nature essays I’ve been writing and revising for what seems like forever. I’m also writing a longer collaborative poem with my friend and poet Ross Gay, about the joys and tribulations of each of our gardens over the past year. And 80% of that collaboration has taken place in exchanges of letters and notes (I refuse to say ‘snail mail’). I’m also planning my soon-to-be-five-year-old’s “outer space and robots” birthday party. And trying to work up the courage to give a haircut to my, shall we say, “spirited” 2-year-old. And of course, writing more poems.

Garrett Hongo

Garrett Hongo was born in the back room of the Hongo Store in Volcano, Hawai`i in 1951. He grew up in Kahuku and Hau`ula on the island of O`ahu and moved to Los Angeles when he was six, much to his everlasting regret. He complained so, his parents sent him back when he was nine, where he lived in Wahiawā and Waimalu with relatives who so hated him, they stuffed him on a plane back to L.A. when he was ten. He grew up fighting from then on, all the way through Gardena High School, where he encountered Shakespeare, Camus, and Sophocles in English classes. They convinced him to try higher education, so he went to Pomona College, managed to graduate, still fighting, and found poetry there under the tutelage of Bert Meyers. He wandered Japan, Michigan, and Seattle thereafter, supporting himself through wits and lies, directing the Asian Exclusion Act from 1975-77, becoming poet-in-residence at the Seattle Arts Commission in 1978. He then gave up wit and went back to graduate school at UC Irvine, studying with the poets Charles Wright, C.K. Williams, and Howard Moss, all of whom averred he deserved hanging. Hongo has subsequently taught at USC, Irvine, Missouri, Houston, and Oregon, where, fool that he was, he directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing from 1989-93. He has written three books of poetry, including Coral Road (Knopf, 2011), edited three anthologies of Asian American literature, and published a book of non-fiction entitled Volcano: A Memoir of Hawai`i (Knopf, 1995). Not among the falsehoods on his resume are two fellowships from the NEA, two from the Rockefeller Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He is now in semi-retirement and fights no one, having lost all his teeth and suffered from tapioca of the hands. He plays with his daughter, scolds his two grown sons, and loves his wife Shelly Withrow. He is presently completing a book of non-fiction entitled The Perfect Sound: An Autobiography in Stereo. In Eugene, where he lives, they call him, among other things, Distinguished Professor of the College of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon.

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LR: As a longtime professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon, what has the relationship between academia and poetry been like in your life?

GH: Academia has provided a space for poetry, actually. We can pursue it seriously this way—in formal classes and workshops. I didn’t fully and consistently connect with my own poetry until I got to an MFA program—at Irvine—where I studied with C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, and Howard Moss. They each gave me something different that I desperately needed—C.K. a big push and a challenge, Charles subtle and constant support and a craftsmanlike approach in answering my own inspirations, and Howard amazing formal wit and geniality in working with my own poetic structures. Since then, as a teacher myself, I try to do things similar for my own students. The poetry workshop has been a haven, though, a place to put the busyness of the world aside and concentrate on poems, poetic thought, the imagination. Academe has been the environment that has supported this most consistently for me.

LR: In your writing, geographical and cultural landscapes have inspired both poetry (e.g., Yellow Light, The River of Heaven, and Coral Road), and prose (Volcano: a Memoir of Hawaii). How do you switch gears from one genre to the other?

CORAL ROAD

GH: It’s not easy, actually. I took years and years to find the prose style for Volcano. I wanted a dense, even a cadenced prose like Melville’s in Moby-Dick, a storytelling one like Thoreau’s in Walden, and a “poetic” one like Emerson’s in his essays. My other models were Kamō-no-Chōmei’s hojōki (translated by Oliver Sadler as “An Account of My Hut”), a kind of Book of Job in Japanese, tsurezuregusa by Yoshida Kenkō (meditations on life and aesthetics translated as Essays in Idleness by Donald Keene), Petrarch’s “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux,” and Yasunari Kawabata’s izu-no-odoriko (The Izu Dancer), a kind of Japanese La Vita Nuova.

You notice only the Kawabata is contemporary? It’s the flaw of the book for general audiences, I suppose, but I wanted to see if I could create a prose that was like poetry. The poet Mark Jarman in The Southern Review likened the book to Wordsworth’s The Prelude, which was a huge compliment and another book in the back of my mind as I wrote. It indeed was about the growth of my own poetic mind, to see if I could, like a python, dislocate my poetic jaws and swallow a huge and gorgeous landscape, all those ostensibly non-poetic subjects like geology, volcanology, rain forest biology, oral family histories, and local talk story. I’d felt my own poetry too confined to take on that Volcano world, so I turned to prose, but not a prose of reportage or standard non-fiction. It had to have the weight of meditation, aimed for the capture of fleeting insights and inspiration like poetry.

After I turned the manuscript in, I was working on revisions and edits with my editor Sonny Mehta. He wanted complete concentration on the project, so we met in his suite at the Bonaventure Hotel in LA for two whole days. The first thing he said to me was “Garrett, now I know why you took so long to turn in this book. It’s not prose, is it?”

It took me a long time, though, to come back to poetry, as my inner identity and voice had been completely altered by the experience of having written Volcano. Some count it as a 23-year long “absence” or silence between The River of Heaven and Coral Road. Chronologically, I suppose it was. But really, what I was doing was adjusting to the new thing I’d found and staying silent about other things I found completely unpoetic in my life—the loss of my first marriage, raising my sons as a bachelor father, accommodating to the quiet regional life in Eugene, Oregon. When I did adjust, when I found a new life with Shelly Withrow, I spoke again and out came Coral Road, which I think is a natural progression from the lessons of Volcano and The River of Heaven, a natural extension of the prose and poetic voices in both.

I’m working on three projects now—one a book of non-fiction about my audio hobby; a new book of prose poems about Los Angeles; and an extended narrative work about a Nisei G.I. at the tail end of WWII and thereafter, studying painting in Florence, Italy. Of the three, only the audio book might actually be in “prose.” The others are very poetic.

As far as landscapes go, they’re a trigger for me, a big part of the magic, if you will, of falling in love with things and speaking poetically about them. I can’t be happy unless landscape is in there. I’m kind of a landscape painter in that sense, like Paul Cézanne or any plein air painter. I love description and can’t write without it. That’s why you see landscapes, cityscapes, and seascapes in my work all over the place. It’s how I start the work of seeing, of being in love with a subject, of being loyal to its feeling.

LR: You have described Coral Road as “a book about travail” and “a song of woe” that dramatizes the unique “dual immigration” experience of Asian Americans who move first from Japan to Hawaii, and then to the mainland after the sugar economy collapsed. What I find particularly interesting about these stories of the Hawaiian diaspora is the way in which discourses of authenticity emerge that imply greater questions about the nature of cultural identity. Could you speak more about some of the writing choices you made when deciding how to best frame these issues in the book?

GH: Do “discourses of authenticity” automatically imply “greater questions of cultural identity?” I don’t think so, actually. I think they tend to shut down the greater questions of cultural identity. In fact, that’s what “discourses of authenticity” are indeed structurally designed to do. Think about the Black Arts Movement, for example. For all its contribution to black pride and the renaissance of African American culture, one of its goals was to shut down, put down, and quash the diversities of cultural identity within African American literary production, identifying, branding, if you will, writers like Ralph Ellison and my own teacher Robert Hayden as “Uncle Toms” and “Negroes” who were too accommodating to white cultural dominance and too learned regarding Western canonical literature. Had Gwendolyn Brooks not embraced the doctrines of the Black Arts Movement, she too would have been denounced and ridiculed for her being so practiced in traditional English poetic forms and diction. I knew Robert Hayden and was shocked when he explained how he was considered persona non grata by black students at the University of Michigan because his poetry had been so branded. It was a disgraceful way to treat the author of “Those Winter Sundays,” “The Middle Passage,” and “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X).” History creates these self-identified movements of “authenticity” as much to stifle as to empower. “When the power shift to their side,/I wasn’t black enough for their pride…” writes Caribbean Derek Walcott in his great poem “The Schooner Flight.” When I read that, I knew and felt deeply what he meant. “I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,/And either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.” Partly because of his hybridity, his mixed-blood and culture, Walcott’s Shabine, the sailor who loves the sea, is outcast within the contemporary nationalist movements of the Caribbean, made an exile from his own homeland. I know that feeling, being an outlier myself.

My basic take is that there are very serious contestations going on regarding indigeneity, hybridity, diaspora, and naturalization to the landscape of Hawai`i. Most writers and scholar/critics have sought legitimation and created discourse at the level of “authenticities” with regard to representation, canceling and vying and seeking ethical, political, and moral certainties. This discourse that was created and now dominates acts as a kind of policing mechanism, therefore, suppressing other diversities of discourse, disciplining existing discourse into the categories set by these policing discourses—e.g., legitimacy, local, Native Hawaiian, outsider, etc.

Under this mechanism, I would qualify as an outsider—the “Mainland,” California, West Coast, or “kotonk” author many of the self-proclaimed “local” writers would label me as. Under the discursive mechanism of indigeneity as value argued for by writers like part-Native Hawaiian Haunani Trask and Japanese American scholar-critic Candace Fujikane at UH-Manoa, I would qualify as a “settler” writer akin to South African descended from colonizing Boers—the Dutch.

However, both these discourses fail to account for history—immigration, migration, and diaspora. My ancestors did not come to colonize Hawai`i as the Dutch did South Africa, nor did they STAY to colonize Hawai`i as Trask and Fujikane say the emergent Japanese American bourgeoisie did. In fact, my family was dispersed in a subsequent diaspora FROM Hawai`i, as the days of King Sugar ended and its laborers had to emigrate once again in order to survive. My family re-settled in Los Angeles, where I grew up from the age of six.

But my early childhood in Hawai`i is no less legitimate than any local writer’s childhood. It’s just that I see it through a different lens—not one of naturalizing myself and my ethnicity to the landscape of Hawai`i, but through the lens of a kind of literary Romanticism, in fact, and also a theoretical awareness of hybridities, diasporic nostalgia and loyalty, and a consciousness that is as much cosmopolitan as regional.

What’s not discussed is that there is a diaspora of displaced peoples FROM Hawai`i—Native Hawaiian, Japanese American, Korean American, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Chinese, hapa-haole, and haole. We cannot be explained, as the policing discourse would explain us, by the label “outsider” quite, as we have histories and attachments to the place completely unlike mainstream tourists or bourgeoisie professionals who come to buy real estate and settle in Hawai`i. Our connection cannot be denied, nor do I wish to displace the claim of any other of the “legitimate,” local, or Native Hawaiian voices that claim they are the essential voices of Hawai`i who should be heard. Not at all.

Yet, I understand how I am perceived as a threat. It’s a shame, but, in a material sense, it is about competition for various forms of recognition—within the local scene, state funding, mainstream publishing. I’ve been lucky that way—in terms of publishing, that is—but it’s not my fault. I had no trouble from the Bamboo Ridge group until I published with Knopf. The fear and anger, I think, come from an anxiety that a single voice will be chosen by the system, already seen as oppressive and discriminatory, the episteme, if you will, as “representative” without election from the region that voice might be (mis)taken to represent. In that sense, the issue has to do with systemic over-simplification and the over-simplified, angry reaction engendered in those who perceive themselves as silenced by that initial over-simplifcation that has selected an “exemplary and representative voice” without input and participation from those silenced and marginalized by this episteme.

When Frank Chin came out with his angry response to the widespread acceptance of Maxine Hong Kingston‘s work, his accusation was she was “fake” Chinese and promulgated stereotypes and a narrative of assimilation into the mainstream, white world. To me, what was more interesting than the accusation was the creation of distinctive, exclusionary, and fundamentalist categories of “the real” and “the fake.” I’ve already written about this in my Intro to Under Western Eyes, my anthology of Asian American non-fiction. I also wrote against nationalist unisonance as a reactionary myth in the Intro to The Open Boat, an anthology of Asian American poetry, in which I tried to argue against a qualifying politics and for diversity—political, aesthetic, cultural, and even ethnic—within the category of AA poetry.

Moreover, there are also at least three other ways to respond to assumptions about authenticity vs. usurpation of that space by “the fake”:

1. My ghosts are in Hawai`i—my father and paternal grandfather in Volcano, my maternal grandfather and grandmother on O`ahu. While my grandmother was still alive—she only passed away two years ago this April (a month shy of her 102nd birthday), I went back every year to visit her on O`ahu. Indeed, she was my fondest connection to the past, especially to Kahuku and Hau`ula.

2. There is a trajectory of blame and scapegoating, a pharmakos, if you will, in the practice of condemning various writers who write of Hawai`i as “illegitimate” and “outsider,” as though these acts, cathartic though they may be, could cleanse the collective guilt we all feel for the injustice and criminality of the land being colonized by non-Hawaiians. These condemnations and vilifications are almost ritual, marking intruders and interlopers, branding them, excluding them on the order of Oedipus being cast out of Thebes as a poisonous presence. The arc of the activity and its passionate performances are psychologically and sociologically beneficial to the performers, identifying them as a “tribe” of authority, indeed in a mimetic fiction of tribal origin in ritualized difference, and casting out non-tribal identities and entities in acts of self-valorization.

3. Nationalisms identify a narrative that there is both a history and an imaginary contemporaneity that are held in common by a group, that those not holding to this narration or bearing its marks are outside the nation. Whether one shares the history is nearly meaningless as one must also dwell in the imaginary contemporaneity as well—in other words, be in sympathy and communication with those who identify themselves as that nation. Deviations, particularly those that advance any competing or more complex narrations, are suspect, threatening, and potentially invalidating of the narrative of the nation. I think this is one difference between the positions/perceptions of Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

LR: In crafting the poetic representations of history that constitute the poems of Coral Road, how did you take the historical source material you gathered to an imaginative poetic space?

GH: I wrote Coral Road as an homage to my mother’s side of my family, the Shigemitsu and Kubota who worked as contract laborers on the North Shore of O`ahu in Hawai`i during the early part of the 20th century, after arriving there as immigrants from Southern Japan. They were a tough, stoical lot, marrying themselves to hard lives on land they occupied for three generations, rootlessly, as the land was never theirs and could never be. They were there for reasons of history and diaspora—the land belonging to capitalism or the lost Kingdom of Hawai`i. What I have of our time there are fragments of stories, songs my grandparents sang washing dishes, a meager handful of documents and a few phrases in Hawaiian and Japanese, and the sparkle of the sea or on the tassels of sugar cane as I drive by whenever I take a survey of those old seaside lands along what is now Kamehameha Highway. I am not a native son nor prodigal one, consequently, but a kind of swallow who has lost his mud home on an island thought by so many to be a paradise.

The people in this book are the legends from my childhood—my grandmother who walked, as a twelve-year old and by night, 25 miles along coral roads and railroad track from Waialua Plantation to Kahuku so she could escape a bad labor contract, her path lit by the moon as she made her way in secret as a runaway; my uncles who fought for America in Europe during World War II, while a family elder was taken from Hawai`i and spent the war years in a DOJ detention center in Arizona; my father, who brought back from Italy and his time in military service an affection for Renaissance painting and American Big Band music. And I am there too—a fourth-generation American hankering for these lives to be known and celebrated, for the music of my language to sing of them.

The historical source material? Just that—as grout and stone for the imaginative seawall I was building to protect my house of histories and mementos from being eroded by time. They undergird the stories I’d already inherited or gave me clues to pursue other stories, all of them part of the matrix of feeling I’d built up, my wish to pay homage, my wish to claim my own descent from that history and that place that has become so different now, even from my own childhood past.

The quick thing to say is that the book is about “heritage” where there is no legacy except love and memory.

LR: You have spoken of your unwavering poetic interest in origin, descent, cultural specificity, and the notion of the imaginary homeland. Where do you think this interest comes from and what techniques have you employed to represent it in your poetry?

GH: I think it comes from having been uprooted at a critical age—six—and then “returned” twice: once when I was nine for a summer in Wahiawā and 5th grade in Waimalu; then, when I was nineteen and I came back to Hau`ula and Kahuku for a winter vacation in the landscape of my childhood. Feelings were released in me I didn’t realize I had—”a great ache,” as I say in the poem “Kawela Studies” about that return when I was nineteen. And the stories I kept hearing pieces of each time I returned—the family stories, very gothic ones, and tying them to other oral histories and the general history of Japanese plantation workers in Hawai`i as more and more scholarly work got done and published.

I have to give thanks to both the storytellers in my family—my grandmother Tsuruko Kubota, my grandfather Hideo Kubota, my aunt Sawako Sanjume, and my cousin Leanne Sanjume—all of them gone now—and to the historians and scholars of this history—Warren Nishimoto and Michi Kodama of the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa, Franklin Odo recently retired from the Smithsonian, and Ronald Takaki at UC Berkeley (recently deceased). They all helped me, encouraged me, released my imagination into the scraps and shards of stories about the plantation past so that I could occupy the interstices between them with my own lyricism and make of them a continuous feeling of loyalty, love, and homage.

As far as technique goes . . . I’m not sure I can answer that so easily. I think about things a great, long time before I compose. I wander the landscape, gaze out over the seascape in Kawela, Kahuku, Hau`ula, walking along the beaches and promontories. I tell myself these stories each time I pass a stand of ironwood trees in Kahuku, every time I pilgrimage to the Japanese graveyard in Kahuku. I try to live in them, you see. Then, when it’s time to write, I write—bringing to bear all I know of these histories and stories, as though they were the myths of my literature, and also bringing to bear all I know of poetry, the history and techniques of poetry in English, and the poetry of the world too as I’ve come to know it. That’s why, in Coral Road, you see Kubota writing to José Arcadio Buendía from One Hundred Years of Solitude, to the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández and the Chinese poets of Angel Island. Why you see the Nisei G.I. I call Fresco painting scenes of plantation life and the 442nd in WWII through what he’s learned from the tradition of the Italian Quattrocento. Traditions in poetry and painting are things I know something about, so it’s my habit to derive from them too—from the Wordworthian verse paragraph in The Prelude, from the extended Whitmanic line, from Ezra Pound’s imagism and rhetorical complexity. It’s just there for me in my training and part of what workshops call “my voice,” so I write easily this way when I do write. But, the big thing is to have what to write in terms of subject and feeling and sweep of imagination. Technique is always there.

LR: The second of the five sections in Coral Road entitled “The Wartime Letters of Hideo Kubota” consists of epistolary poems that challenge the politics of WWII, which America largely regards as the touchstone of just war. Written in the voices of Americans whose loyalty to the flag is in question due to their ethnic origin, these poems also consider how subsequent generations are touched and shaped by the emotional fallout of war. It is difficult to read these meditations on WWII without drawing contemporary parallels to the War on Terror and its effects on Muslim American citizens. Can you talk a bit about how you see the relationship between past and present in Coral Road?

GH: I was just on the phone with my old and dear friend, the poet Edward Hirsch, and we were talking about just this sort of thing—how history and its devastations, its trials of the human soul, have given us great lessons that survive in the poetry from these times as repositories of human wisdom. In one of his tragedies, Aeschylus writes: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” It’s this kind of wisdom Kubota seeks when he writes to his chosen sages in poetry—the Turkish poet, a Communist, Nazim Hikmet, who was imprisoned by his own government for sedition; to Tadeusz Różewicz, the great Polish poet of post-war reconstruction who came back to a country both physically and psychologically devastated by war and created a poetry of simple human values, direct statements, and blunt-force love. He invokes their spirit to both console and counsel him through his own travail and isolation, a detainee in a Justice Department camp. He reaches out and conjures their spirits to lend him their wisdom, their patience, and their resolve to continue—to prevail, as Faulkner said.

I write so much about the past because I wish to be its child. I look upon the lives and spirits of my grandfather, Hideo Kubota, and father, Albert Hongo, as exemplary. To me, they were Titans who walked the earth, who fought through an elemental history in order that I could be their mortal son. I want to pay them homage, I want to live up to them, I want them to welcome me in heaven when my time comes. Despite the distractions and beguilements of the contemporary world—Calypso’s spell—I want their past to live in my present and to guide it. That’s how I try to live, how I try to write.

LR: Do you have a specific routine that you like to follow when you sit down to write? If so, could you describe it for us?

GH: Yes, after I’ve committed to composing a piece, whether extended or short, I simply sit down after breakfast and coffee and pick up a note from my notebook, whether it’s a collection of images or another kind of composing idea or narrative situation, and I begin writing. Usually, the style comes out pretty easily, as I’ve worked all that out before I commit to composing. I “hear” a voice, in other words, in the back of my head—”a chune,” as Yeats said. For example, in “The Wartime Letters of Hideo Kubota,” I knew which poets Kubota was to address and which of their poems—”Lullaby to an Onion” by Miguel Hernández, for example, and the situation of him in a Fascist prison near Madrid. Kubota himself was locked in the stockade of the trading post in Leupp, AZ on the Navajo Nation near Flagstaff on the Mogollon Plateau. I had these facts, these situations, and I simply wrote. The poem came out in one day from first draft through about three revisions from notebook entry, some re-worked lines, then to typescript, back to lines revised over the typescript and written by hand, then another typescript revision. And so on. But, to arrive at that point of composition took, I’d say, years. I had the idea of an AJA detainee at Leupp for over thirty years, having visited the place my freshman year in college in 1970. I knew Hernández’s poem for almost that long and his plight, having received a letter while he was in prison from his wife who said that they were starving, having nothing to eat but onions, that even her breastmilk for their infant son must taste of onions. And I knew from stories Wakako Yamauchi had told me of AJA farmers during the Depression having nothing but carrots to eat what that must be like. Finally, I’d dramatized the situation for myself in my own head—a sequence of poems from Kubota to these world poets who’d suffered detention and then release: Nazim Hikmet,  César Vallejo (poem uncollected), the Chinese poets of Angel Island, Pablo Neruda, Tadeusz Różewicz, and others. Finally, though I’d planned for Kubota to address Czeslaw Milosz during the days after returning from WW II when he wrote “Dedication,” I hit upon José Arcadio Buendía tied to a tree from Cien Años de Soledad and Charles Olson‘s “Maximus, to himself” and “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]“to fill out the sequence. Those situations filled out the “stages” of Kubota’s struggle, if you will, his progress from forlorn and emotionally abandoned detainee to returnee and a new citizen of his village on the North Shore of O`ahu.

The poems arrive from my feelings of yearning back so long ago for a history, a people, a story, our AJA and Asian American identities having suffered without foundational epics, narratives when I was a kid growing up in Hawai`i and L.A. I wanted this for myself, for the people I loved whom I’d witnessed, I thought, abandoned by history. And they arrive from my learning in literature, from my having created a cadence and a diction for my own poetry. Finally, they arrive from imagination—dreaming all these things together is the process that makes the poem begin.

The routine is nothing but routine I guess, it’s very special and more like a sort of ritual after I’ve gathered all these other things up—more like an actor’s performance after having built a character and placed him in a narrative situation. In this way, my poems are like an actor’s takes for the camera, except mine are for the page.

LR: After writing three books, what’s your secret for keeping your poetry fresh?

GH: Hah! Maybe it isn’t! I mean compared to what younger poets are doing, my stuff is pretty traditional, I guess. I’m not trying anything new or quirky or post-modern, not sampling or incorporating collage or rap or talk radio or graffiti. I’m going back to AJA history, British and American Romanticism, and the world of hope poets speak from internationally in the face of oppression and war. Harking back is what I do, I think. So “fresh” isn’t a value for me so much as depth, yearning, and a vision backwards glancing through history.

I invent situations, though, characters like Kubota, Fresco, and my old shakuhachi maker from Yellow Light. I’ve characters I’m collecting now—based on Nisei artists in LA’s J-Town and Chinatown just before WWII, based on a Nisei G.I. studying painting in Florence just after WWII, a Sansei based on the kabuki character from the play Sukeroku, and the like, a Sansei singer for a rock band based on an amazing woman I used to know whose family ran a restaurant in J-Town. I put them all in a bar in J-Town in the Fifties and Sixties. These are for my next book, all about AJA life in LA, and kind of centered around music and painting, musicians and painters.

LR: In 1993, you edited The Open Boat—a seminal anthology of contemporary Asian American poetry. What led you to compile such an anthology at that particular time? In your view, how has the position of Asian American poets within the landscape of publishing changed since then, if at all?

GH: Well, that’s a question with many answers, to tell you the truth. I decided to do it, again, mainly because I was tired of the Asian American critics, such as they were, dominating the interpretive reception of Asian American poetry, claiming it was one, lock-step, proletarian-based and anti-hegemonic protest against The Man. In the early 90s, I’d been invited to an Asian American literary conference at a major West Coast university—the first one in years, although I’d been part of the first AA lit conferences back in the 70s—and was appalled at the hammerlock on open interpretation of the poetry these critics were executing and among so many of their college and university students. Granted, the mainstream hadn’t yet quite awakened to the presence of Asian American poets as a “collective,” but these Asian American critics hadn’t yet awakened to the principle of diversity and inclusion—aesthetic, political, ethnic, and regional. I write about it in my Intro to The Open Boat (and give more specifics, I might add). And, I felt, they were actively silencing this diversity. This reminded me so much of the work of what playwright David Henry Hwang has called “The Gang of Four” in their attempts at gate-keeping through their anthologizing, essays, and back-stabbing—they acted and functioned like a literary Mafia, condemning any outbreaks from the party line they issued, publicly denouncing single writers. What struck me was here, at this literary conference, there was in play another serious attempt at “licensing” the category of Asian American literature by a cadre of like-minded, politically narrow thinkers. I really didn’t like that.

I wanted to open things up because I knew that Asian American poetry was this huge spectrum of practice, from the activist and consciousness-raising work of Janice Mirikitani and Lawson Fusao Inada to the avant-garde work of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and John Yau. I knew there were South Asians like Chitra Divakaruni and Agha Shahid Ali and multi-racial Asians like Ai, Yau, and Mei-mei practicing poetry. And poets like Arthur Sze practicing a highly nuanced, sophisticated lyric that had to do as much with human consciousness and linguistic play and reverie as any ethnic identity. These were poets I felt fell outside the descriptive category of “Asian American” as defined by the academic critics and students I was meeting at the conference. I wanted to include those who fell outside that narrowing descriptive category. I wanted an “open boat,” if you will.

I also wanted to introduce our poetry to a wider audience. To ourselves: those Asians out there who were yearning to hear from us; those in the mainstream who would welcome new voices, welcome the diversity we brought to America singing. That’s why I lobbied hard to include photographs in the anthology—because I knew we’d look so striking and handsome. And I wanted a book of us and for it to come from a major press that could not be ignored. Because of Martha Levin, then Publisher (who much later became Chitra Divakaruni’s first fiction editor), I found that in Anchor Doubleday.

Finally, I did it because I could. A lot of opportunities came my way after The River of Heaven came out, and this was a project I thought up myself and believed in. Publishers were really willing to get behind a lot of things I’d propose, but this was the project closest to my heart. And that I could hire my MFA students to do the initial reading and recommendations was another benefit—Eugene Gloria, Charles Flowers, and Mary Chan all worked on surveying the field, writing short reports, and making recommendations to me. I certainly gave them leads, identifying some of the major voices and most talented emerging poets I knew of, but they did the bulk of the initial work. And Charles Flowers, who ended up being David Mura‘s editor at Anchor and later Associate Director of the Academy of American Poets and Executive Director of LAMBDA, now editor of Bloom, handled all permissions. It was fun to be able to give him that summer job.

How has the landscape of publishing changed? Well, it is more diverse, isn’t it? Famous Asian American authors are numerous now, and, in publishing itself, there are Asian American editors now, Asian American literary agents, even very exciting Asian American publishers like Kaya Books and workshops dedicated to celebrating Asian American work like the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Kundiman. Lots has gone on and no sole entity or Mafia owns the imprint of Asian American literature anymore. Even though some may still try.

And how has the position of Asian American poets changed? Look at who’s just been named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets—Arthur Sze. That’s so cool….

LR: Do you have any advice for emerging Asian American writers who are just beginning to put their work out on the market?

GH: First of all, I wouldn’t think in terms of “the market.” With the internet, laptop publishing, readings all the time, and e-zines, the market now is more of a scene than when I started and, in that sense, it’s much more exciting. But it’s still only a medium. You can get caught up in the scene and still never accomplish your own work. If you’ve something to say, find how to say it first—-find a place, a group, a workshop, a graduate program that can help you. That’s what happened to me. I never got so serious about my work, never was asked to take my work as seriously as when I got to the MFA Program at UC Irvine and found myself among teachers like C.K. Williams, Charles Wright, Howard Moss, and Mark Jarman and classmates like Yusef Komunyakaa, Helena Viramontes, and Carolyn Doty. And my first MFA students then too—Juan Delgado, Maurya Simon, and Paul Marion—who worked with me when I was hired at Irvine for one of my first academic jobs.

Other poets, particularly one’s elders, will insist on better work from you—work that you yourself might not think you’re capable of and you need that insistence. And elders who teach might even show you how to do it if you’re lucky. It’s what happened to me.

Tina Chang

Brooklyn Poet Laureate, Tina Chang, was raised in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books) and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008) along with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and The New York Times among others.

Her work has also been anthologized in Identity Lessons, Poetry Nation, Asian American Literature, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems and in Poetry 30: Poets in Their Thirties. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, and the Van Lier Foundation among others.

She currently teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.

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LR: You have spoken of how your role as Brooklyn Poet Laureate has led to a greater sense of moral responsibility, and at Sarah Lawrence College, you even teach a class called “Poet as World Citizen.” How does this sense of responsibility play out for you in your writing?

TC: In my role as poet laureate, there is a public connection and recognition of matters that are important to me: education, literacy, the Asian American experience, the female experience, motherhood. These are only a few of the topics to which I pledge loyalty, and those communities have helped me feel a firmer footing in a sometimes uncertain world.

When I conceived of the class “Poet As World Citizen,” I envisioned a student who never loses their sense of themselves as an active participant in a world in flux. I can no longer live in a vacuum, and I think our literature and the study of it must reflect that. I can no longer write a domestic kind of poetry which doesn’t call attention to the complexities outside of the United States. Because I teach and I engage in my community, I feel invested in ongoing dialogue, a dialogue of exposure, questioning, and investigation. I bring all of this to the page when I write.

LR: In a video you made for Poets.org entitled “The Poetics of Multi-tasking,” you speak of the pleasures and the difficulties of embodying the multiple roles of writer, poet laureate, educator, mother, and public servant all at once. How have these different roles emerged and evolved in your work?

TC: All of these roles are a part of me, but they do not always meld together in the most graceful of ways. There are days when I am a good mother but I have not written as much as I would have liked. There are other days when I’ve been an effective laureate but I was not able to put my children to bed. The list goes on. I consider myself lucky, though, to have entrée into these many different lives and sides of myself. How fortunate in this life that I am able to speak about language and ideas and then experience the bliss of returning home to find my apartment in complete disarray, my son and daughter running to hug me with their arms wrapped around my legs.

Ultimately, I have grown as result of all of this. I’m at a place in my life where I practice what I love and I work with students who I consider my peers in intellect and maturity in many ways. We are blessed to talk about books and the weight of poetry. I think about many of our discussions as I write. Similarly, I am affected by my work as poet laureate. I work with communities of people who are vastly different from me. I work with servants to the art of literature and I am humbled by their dedication and service. Each word I write and each project I take on, I am trying to honor them in some way.

LR: You have spoken very openly about experiencing writer’s block in the wake of 9/11. How did that period of silence change the way you write, and how do you manage writer’s block now?

TC: When I finally came out of that silence and writer’s block, the words poured from me. I was angry, shocked, in grief. I think when someone is working from that place of emotional immediacy, that sincerity of expression is palpable. There are still moments when I wonder when the next poem will come to me, but there is a deeper faith now. After you’ve been in a dark place for a long time, when you come into the light, it’s the light that becomes your new shelter. In that way, I’m living in that light now. I don’t doubt myself or my language anymore. What came out of that time was an unshakable belief that poetry is as alive as a civilization or a world.

LR: Can you walk us through the typical evolution of one of your poems? How is it born? How do you revise? How do you know when it’s finished?

TC: My process has changed tremendously since I’ve had my children. I once had long, languid days that unfurled in one fluid gesture of creation. At night, I shared my ideas with other writers or friends and that would give life to other poems. These days, after I have fed, napped, entertained, bathed, changed, and put my children to bed, I have my dinner, put on my shoes, and head to the rented office around the corner.

Nowadays, my creativity is summoned within a two-hour time span. In this way, my writing has become more efficient. I will keep mental notes during the day as I run around playgrounds and do the laundry. Those notes will then find their way into poems by evening. I then type furiously. The objective is to keep my hands moving and if my hands are moving my mind is working.

I sometimes have many pages of text. In subsequent visits or drafts, the poems will come into fuller form. Over the course of the next couple of months I’ll see a relationship among my poems and I’ll ask them what they are saying to one another. Once I sense some answers, the poems will develop their own identity and the theme/obsessions of my work will rise to the surface in more realized poems.

I don’t think poems are ever finished. I have been known to cross out words and add lines to my books of poetry. If I am not happy with a line before a reading, I’ll gladly edit the text in my book so that I’ll feel comfortable reading it to an audience. Text and language is alive so it’s always changing. To me, there is no end point and that is a joy.

LR: With two books now under your belt, what is your process for putting together a manuscript?

TC: With my first manuscript, I had no concept that I was writing a book at all. I was writing individual poems which focused on family, loss, and redemption. Only when the pile of my poems became quite large did I think I should organize them and send them out to be considered for publication. I was lucky when Four Way Books accepted the book. With my second collection, there was a greater consciousness that I was making a book. I was aware of subject, theme, obsession and the systems by which ideas were tied together. Orchestration of poems is a different kind of negotiation, and the second collection taught me about vision. Now, I am experiencing the excitement of working on my third collection, and I’m in that elated place of making work for the sheer pleasure of making it. A year from now, I will have to go through the process of finding a home for them in a larger collection. For now, I’m happy to sit with the poems as independent entities.

LR: In Of Gods & Strangers, you seem to be exploring the tension between individual vs. collective identity by juxtaposing several modes of the first person. In some places, you rely on the intimate first person singular to convey your narrative, while in others, you use the first person plural, or employ a more distant, “projected” first person through the use of persona. Can you speak more about this tension between the personal and the universal, and how it plays into your vision for the book?

OF GODS & STRANGERS

TC: The negotiations you speak of were exactly the struggles I was encountering as I was living and also writing this book. It was very hard to come to terms with the validity of my existence as a writer during this time. What was my individual experience worth in a time when the collective was in such distress and danger? Our continuing war, our economy, our lack of compassionate and wise leadership, the fall of our faith. The great “We” was really suffering as a nation and a tribe. I felt these struggles each day and I also pushed forward to give expression to this.

As I result, I found a figure like the Empress Dowager while writing the book. I could place that mask on, that persona, and find my power. In her stature and unapologetic gestures, I found a place to be certain and steady. By reaching back to this historical figure and distant first person, I found my footing, and with that power I felt an ability to unleash what I was feeling about our current American and transnational dramas.

I took a great risk with the first poem of the book, “Unfinished Book of Mortals.” It’s a long poem that seeks to tell the story of the last ten years in America. That’s pretty audacious to begin with. Each line is preceded by a roman numeral which I imagine to be the headings of individual chapters of the book of our time. The president, Chinese myth, and present/past lovers are involved. Anything seems for the taking as public and private domains blur. I am seeking to tell the universal story of our collective hurt, damage, and resilience while employing the personal first person. This type of internal negotiation feels at the heart of my process of writing Of Gods & Strangers.

LR: There is a distinctive dreamlike quality to Of Gods & Strangers. How much do you rely on dreams for inspiration, and how do you tap into your unconscious mind when working?

TC: In the final pages of the book, there is a section called “Author’s Notes on Imaginary Poems.” Many of these final poems were inspired by dreams. Though they appear at the end of the book, they were the earliest poems that were written and provided me with the vision for the book.

In the days after 9/11, I had a difficult time sleeping, and when I fell asleep I would have nightmares. Many months later, I had a dream that I was riding on a train and as the train headed outdoors, I could see the Twin Towers. The towers were no longer made of brick and steel but of sheets of paper, and they floated away leaf by leaf. I pressed my face to the train’s window as if I could somehow keep the buildings together by sheer will and imagination. I wanted everything to stay intact and yet the wind kept blowing, the pages lifted and were carried away by the wind like spirits until the buildings disappeared. And in my poem, I wrote, “In a dream city constructed from paper, flames were lit. My God . . .” So many of my poems are written in this way, so dream plays a large part in my writing. Sometimes there are visions that I wake to or just the flavor of something I cannot name. I struggle to name it. There are other times when I can see a scene vividly in a daydream. I know I was not there, but I can summon the environment or characters as if I lived that life.

As a writer progresses, it becomes more intuitive and organic to tap into the subconscious state. It’s as if I am taking dictation. I am listening carefully and the words write themselves.

LR: What is the best piece of advice you have received about the writing life?

TC: “Never stop writing,” said my graduate writing professor when I stepped out the doors of Columbia University. I was petrified. I had no idea what I was going to do as a poet. I felt crazy. Through the years, those words of advice kept coming back to me in my darkest times as a writer. This piece of advice which seemed so simple and so small saved me time and time again.

LR: What has motivated you through times of uncertainty as a poet?

TC: I’m a part of a small community of writers who I trust with everything: my writing, my confidence, my life. They have sustained me. There were times when I wondered, “Who is reading the work? Who is reading poetry?” They were present to say, “I am. I am reading poetry. I hear your voice.” I felt their presence in each stage of my writer’s life. There were times when they took extreme measures: throwing a blank notebook in my direction, or even yelling at me in an effort to express the importance of art, creation, process, or self-worth in relation to all of that. They reminded me that if I followed this path, I could fulfill my destiny.

LR: In the 2010 Publishers Weekly article entitled “Why I Write,” you wrote that, ever since having been sent from the US as a toddler to live in Taiwan after your father passed away, the “recollection of language is at the core of who I am, why I work, why I write. I write in order to capture what is no longer there: sweet ghost of minutes, mist covering the thatched roofs, vendors calling out their wares to the windows, typhoon rattling the red door of my childhood home in summer.” At the same time, many of your poems (such as “Duality”) seem deeply grounded in a sense of being an American, a New Yorker, and Brooklynite. As you straddle and thus fluidly negotiate the components of your transnational identity, how do you engage with these different sensibilities when you sit down to write a poem or work out the structure of a new manuscript?

TC: Anyone who has grown up in a household of dual language, dual identity, or a multi-cultural upbringing has probably always had the feeling of belonging to many different places, and as a result, the self is both multiplied and fractured. There were times in my youth when I felt this multinationalism was a burden or even an embarrassment. When I was a teenager, I wondered why I had to negotiate this intricate emotional terrain. I remember distinctly wanting to feel simpler, less complex, and less messy.

After college, I didn’t know what to do, so I boarded a plane to my mother’s homeland, Taiwan, to teach English as a Second Language. I thought I would do something useful with my time and help others. It turned out that my students helped me. As we conversed in English and Chinese and as we bounced from one language to the other, sometimes with great dexterity and at other times with tremendous awkwardness, I realized that this encapsulated how I felt my whole life. Sitting with my students, I saw a mirror image of myself. I saw their wish to learn English, to change themselves, in an effort to live out a dream.

I wondered why I had rejected this complex, awkward negotiation when they seemed so ready to embrace the relationship of self to self. In Of Gods & Strangers, I was excited for that discussion to play itself out. The traditional Empress Dowager is present throughout, but in one of the first poems of the book, “The Empress Dowager Boogies,” there is a gesture to combine tradition and contemporary life. Poems that focus on a traditional Chinese figure are placed side by side with poems such as, “Self-Portrait as an Imaginary DJ” or “Bitch Tree.” And, in this way, I am translating my contemporary Asian American experience. It is as audacious as it is filled with humility. Part disco, part Walled City, and I’m finally ready to own the totality of that experience.

LR: You have said that one of your goals as Brooklyn Poet Laureate is to make people feel included in the world of poetry. How do you think those of us in the poetry community can work to make poetry feel more accessible to American audiences?

TC: It took me a long time to come to poetry. In the ways that most people are educated in this artform, it can feel quite intimidating. I remember being asked by teachers, “What does this poem mean?” as opposed to the more important question, “How does this poem make you feel?” It was how poetry made me feel that led me to want to live inside it. As I educate my students now, we talk about poetry in terms that our mothers, fathers, brothers could understand. We talk about how an image or moment stirred us to remember something or asked us to ponder our own reactions to material.

As a poet laureate, I seek to be real about my approach to poetry. I am the first to admit when a poem feels hard to access or difficult to interpret. I am also very real about not having it all as a woman, mother, poet, educator. By grounding our work and ourselves, we make ourselves more approachable. We can speak about a poem in terms of what we can understand or access instead of what we cannot.

I have spontaneously recited or read poems to children as young as 4 or 5, who can immediately tell me what the poem meant to them. They are not afraid to interpret an image, a memory, or even an abstract string of words. There is a wild purity to them and poetry to me is a demonstration of that purity. How free, how happy poetry can be when seen through the eyes of those who have yet been untouched by judgment. How fun and ecstatic the moment is when art is embraced in the spirit in which it was made. Children remind me that poetry is not “hard.” It is just the opposite. Words are a celebration of the mind.

LR: Can you tell us what you’re working on now?

TC: I am working on a book of reimagined fairy tales and classic children’s stories. I spend most of my days reading to my children, and my imagination has taken hold of those stories and refashioned them. What I notice is there is always a form of danger at work in fairy tales. The figures of the wolf, fox, snake, witch, hunter are present in almost every children’s story in every culture. It’s as if these stories were made to warn as much as they [were made to] entertain or educate. In my poems the fairy tales are even more disturbing, as they call on the real dangers of contemporary life like war, disease, crime. Before I get too carried away in that direction, the poems also focus on the magic of the abiding love for one’s children. That is the greatest myth of all.

Adrienne Su

Adrienne Su is the author of three books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D, 2009). Among her awards are a Puschart Prize and an NEA fellowship. She is poet-in-residence and chair of the English department at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Recent poems are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, New England Review, and Hawai’i Pacific Review.

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LR: In the 1990s, you participated in the slam poetry revival, even going to the nationals for the NYC team in 1991. How did you move from the poetry slam world to your current place in academia?

AS: I fell into the poetry slam by accident when I was too young to have a writerly identity and the slam was too young to have specific expectations of contestants. There was less of a page-stage divide. I saw no contradiction in reading my poems at the Nuyorican Poets Café while sending them to university-based literary journals. And the Nuyorican was a revelation. I’d never experienced writing in such a social way before. So while it may look as if I made a major transition over the years, I was really pursuing what I loved all along in whatever venues would have me. The people I met in both worlds had the same passions, though they may have been expressed differently on the surface.

Getting into academia was a different story: you don’t get an academic job by accident. Even there, though, I thought my presence might be temporary. I started out as a sabbatical replacement and only gradually began to identify myself as a member of academia. Departing from the slam scene happened organically: I no longer lived in a city, I had children, and the slam itself had changed, requiring acting skills. Not long ago, I went back to the Nuyorican and saw a whole new generation of poets doing what “we” were doing twenty years earlier. It was terrific. For me, its time had come and gone, and that was fine.

LR: You have stated in the past that your days in slam poetry taught you the value of connecting with people through the spoken word and reaching the non-university audience. How do you maintain that sense of the social in your work now?

AS: I think I do this mainly by continuing to write poems that on some levels can be read by anyone.

LR: Poetry of the academy and poetry that is accessible to non-literary audiences are often perceived as contradictory. As a poet of the academy with a spoken word past, how do you reconcile the two?

AS: I think I address this somewhat in question 1, but I might add that academic institutions can also be great home bases for students to create spoken-word events. Students are doing this at Dickinson College, where I teach. I’d also suggest that as educators, we don’t have to treat “page” and “spoken-word” poems the same way in class. Some poems you need to pick apart. Some you can just listen to or watch, and discuss in a different way: that too is instructive. The poems that don’t need much interpretation can be the hardest to use in class. That requires some adaptation on the part of the teacher.

LR: Parenting is a common subject in your poems. How do you balance being a working poet and a parent?

AS: Time management cubed. Electronic reminders. Lunch at my desk.

LR: After publishing three books of poems, what strategies have you found for moving from one book to another? How do you know when one book is finished and when the next is ready to begin?

AS: I think I’m better at telling when one is finished than telling when a new one is ready to begin. The latter is much more difficult: you’re casting about in the void unless there’s a plan in place, which there rarely is. That said, I did have a plan for Having None of It.

LR: Your last two books have been published by Manic D Press, while your first was published by Alice James Books. Though both Manic D and Alice James are small presses, each has a distinctly unique ethos. Can you talk about the experience of working with two different presses of different sizes and—presumably—of different editorial viewpoints? What attracted you to each of them? What advice would you give to young poets about selecting presses to which to send their work?

AS: I was drawn to both for their devotion to the work, to keeping their books in print. AJB’s two-year work commitment was perfect for where I was in life at the time; even if I lived in the region now, I would have a much harder time traveling for regular meetings and reading manuscripts. Manic D has wonderful freshness and irreverence. As with AJB, Manic D is all about the work—and perhaps it’s in keeping with my poetry-slam past, which indeed is how Manic D and I made our first acquaintance (through their Poetry Slam anthology).

HAVING NONE OF IT

LR: The poems in Having None of It weave in and out of the weighty topics of immigration and family history with a lightness of touch, as in “Imagining China” and “Inheritance”. Similarly, you imbue lighter poems based on pop cultural experience, such as “Ode to a Lipstick”, “Even the Overachievers Had Barbies”, and “T.J. Maxx”, with deeper and darker layers of meaning. These poems seem to insist on the multiplicity of identity, that each individual has a multitude of facets—mother, lover, daughter, Chinese, American, academic, consumer, subject, and object. I am fascinated by your exploration of “otherness”—both in terms of gender and in terms of culture. Can you talk a bit about how these critical and political concerns bleed over into more practical considerations of craft?

AS: Thank you for seeing the lightness and heaviness, which I do intend. Still, I may be the worst person to talk about such craft questions, as most of these things happened organically. When I was growing up, I didn’t see it as ironic that while I was viewed as Chinese, I knew no Chinese and thrived on the study of Latin. Non-Western languages and literature were not available for me to study. In college, I indulged my interest in them, taking Chinese and Japanese but on some level longing to be in the English department—and intending, of course, to be a writer in English. Everywhere I went, I was half in another place. It’s perfect displacement for being a poet.

LR: The poems in Having None of It possess an effortlessness and simplicity of language that belies a rigorous experimentation with form. Some poems adhere more firmly to form, as in the blank verse couplets of “Inheritance,” and others deal with it more loosely, as a jazz musician might, as in the slant rhymes of “Having It All.” How is your relationship with form evolving through your career?

AS: I’m not sure whether it’s evolving; it seems to be a pact between me and form. I keep wondering when I’m going to depart from it, but I keep going back. It’s how I find my way.

LR: With the emergence of more Asian American poets in the field than ever before, audiences are becoming more accustomed to reflections of the Asian American experience. Do you perceive any changes in the way that identity is being dealt with in Asian American poetry, and in the way Asian American poets are being read? Has this affected the way you write and think about identity in your own writing?

AS: It’s becoming more of a normal topic and less of an “ethnic” topic. This is good. It frees me and other Asian-American poets to address it without necessarily making an issue of it. It lets identity be just one more dimension of a poem, rather than its reason for being, and reduces the danger of falling into polemical territory.

LR: Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?

AS: My manuscript, The House Unburned, is—and I may be wrong here—about whether we shape our lives or they’re fated. I know that sounds absurd, but it doesn’t have as clear a subject as Having None of It does. Some of the poems are about food, others on love, others on laundry. What life is made of.

Janine Oshiro

Janine Oshiro holds degrees from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University), Portland State University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is a Kundiman fellow and the recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon’s Literary Arts. Her first book Pier was the winner of the 2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize and was recently published by Alice James Books. She lives in Hawaii and teaches at Windward Community College.

LR: In Pier, which is so richly evocative of the complex emotions surrounding the illness and loss of a loved one, you strike a fine balance between confession and creative license, authentic experience and fantasy. How did you find this balance? And how did you avoid sentimentality?

PIER

JO: I’ll first respond to the “S-word.” I didn’t think consciously about avoiding sentimentality; while I don’t want to be sentimental, I do think that sometimes the fear of sentimentality can inhibit the exploration of emotions. Sometimes the truth of a person’s experience can come off as sentimental in a poem. There is no way around that. I would much rather read a poem that strikes me as authentic and a little sentimental than a poem that is just hip and ironic or detached and intellectual. I think about a poet like James Galvin, who in his latest book has a poem called “Two Angels,” featuring a boy with a mental disability and a dog. It walks the fine line. I truly admire that he doesn’t shy away from what might be construed as sentimental. In a way I think the fearlessness to even approach the sentimental is what makes some of his poems so powerful for me. I know that I have written some sentimental poems and poems I would never want anyone to read, and those poems have been important in my development as a writer and as a person.

I don’t really know that I can answer the question about balance. Did I have a strategy for finding a balance? No. I had all these questions about losing my mom, seeing my dad’s health decline, experiencing invisible presences, having a distinctly marked body, and feeling an “other” to myself. Writing the poems was my way of trying to answer these questions—even though I wasn’t really aware of that as my “project” at the beginning. Of course, I could have chosen to answer these questions through journaling and therapy, which I did to a certain extent. But then there is this—making a word-object with sound constellations, reimagining experience, creating a new and authentic experience in the word-world. What really happened? I didn’t really see a school of spoons swimming in the ocean though I write about it in the poem “Setting,” but I really did experience something crawling out of a zippered compartment in the wall and running down my body as I describe in “Next, Dust.” In the world of the poem what really happened doesn’t matter. It is all really happening in the world of the poem.

LR: How did you discover the language of this book, which, as in poems like “Three Capes”, “Eleven Dancers”, and “Next, Dust”, makes ready use of off-rhyme, sentence fragments, interjections, disruptions, and onomatopoeia?

JO: I love fooling around with words. I love just writing words on the page and giving those words sound siblings to see what happens. I love found language and jotting down words and phrases that are striking. I remember reading something once in a National Geographic about bodies oxidizing, and that ended up as “our bodies rust” in the poem “Relic.” I have found language from medical texts, of course, and books about grammar, book arts, gardening, critical theory, psychology, etc. I even find the explanatory language of the dictionary compelling. It is often the case for me that found language triggers an idea or emotion that starts a poem. Sometimes the found language finds its way out of the poem at the end, and sometimes it stays.

LR: Your voice is restrained, ethereal, sometimes clinical, and other times, it captures the whimsy of childhood. Did you have particular strategies of craft in mind while you were shaping this voice?

JO: The word “strategy” has been tainted for me by my college’s accreditation activities, which results in so much chatter about “strategic plans” and “strategic outcomes,” so I’m having a bit of trouble connecting strategy with poetry. Right now I want them as far away from each other as possible. I guess I think there is a danger in too closely identifying a strategy. Okay, so something happened, and I like it, but it isn’t the case that I necessarily want the same thing to happen again. I don’t want an “exportable strategy” in poetry. In the writing process I stumble upon a voice, and I want to see how far that voice will go. Maybe it keeps going, or maybe it dissolves. Maybe I stumble upon another voice, and I want to see how the two voices will work together. The poet Mary Szybist visited a class I took at Portland State University, and I’ll paraphrase here something she said: I’m not interested in finding my voice, but in making many voices. This was liberating for me to hear at the time, and I still think about it today. How many voices can I make?

LR: How did you come upon the tripartite structure of the book?

JO: Going from a manuscript to the published book was a fascinating experience. Sarah Gambito actually helped me to find the structure. It was originally just ordered without sections, and then I put it into five sections. I remember she asked, “Why five sections?” I really had no answer. I started thinking more about what I wanted the reader to experience as a whole. It took time for me to be able to see the poems without attachment to the order in which I wrote them and surface content, but eventually I eliminated some poems and came to this sequence. The simplest way for me to explain it is that in section one, there is a problem. In section two, I’m trying to act out various solutions to the problem. Section three attempts to resolve the problem. It creates an arc, though hardly original, that makes sense for the individual poems. It seems simplistic as I’ve explained it, but it took quite a process to figure it out.

LR: Can you describe the journey that this book took in its writing and path to publication?

JO: I certainly couldn’t conceive of a book when I first started writing poems. These poems were written and revised during my three years in graduate school at Portland State University and my two years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I am so grateful for the poets I worked with in Portland and Iowa, both fellow workshoppers and teachers. Many of these poems are in conversation with poems I read in my workshops. I continued to make minor revisions for a couple of years after graduate school, but the poems were mainly formed during those five years. After I won the Kundiman Prize, I did more revising and the final shaping of the manuscript. Sarah Gambito was my “editing buddy” during that time, and it was such a pleasure to work with her. Everyone from Alice James Books was incredible; I couldn’t have asked for anything more.

Of course the manuscript was rejected countless times before this. When Sarah Gambito called to tell me, I cried. It was happiness, but something else, too. It was maybe fear, maybe a sense of emptiness. This one thing that I wanted more than anything had happened. Now what?

LR: Do you have any advice for poets who are putting together their first books now?

JO: I loved my time in workshop, but I think the time when I most needed feedback was when I was looking at the manuscript as a whole. Getting feedback on the whole manuscript or even a small collection seems more useful to me now than feedback on individual poems. Mark Levine was my thesis advisor at Iowa, and he suggested an ordering for the manuscript that was radical for me because I was attached to the order in which I wrote the poems; he suggested ending the manuscript with the poem “February,” which I never would have considered on my own. The idea of ending the manuscript with the line “It was not spring” was so devastating to me that it actually made me write the poem “Chorus,” which now ends the book. I didn’t know that thinking about the poems as one manuscript could generate new poems.

I think it’s important for poets to feel good about their own process—no matter what anyone else is doing. When I was in graduate school, I was shocked by how prolific some poets were—and they were writing amazing poems, so it wasn’t just quantity! I work slowly, and now that I teach, it’s going even more slowly. It used to make me a little anxious, but now it’s okay. I’m writing my poems in my own way and in my own time.

LR: What is your writing process like? What do you draw on for inspiration? Do you have favorite exercises or rituals that you like to use? If so, can you share a few of them?

JO: I accumulate notes and journal entries and scraps of language, and then I play around with them to make something meaningful for myself. I think play—exploring and enjoying language— is essential, no matter what the content. I like to write, go for a walk, and then write a little more. I usually have some formal concern that I am also working through—maybe couplets, or the relationship of prose chunks to lines, or iambic pentameter, or just writing a nine-line poem. What can happen in nine lines?

LR: How do you keep yourself accountable? Do you have writing partners, people to whom you send your work, or a writing group to which you belong?

JO: Sometimes writing is a priority. Sometimes teaching is a priority. Waking up and meditating is always a priority. Moving toward spiritual growth is always a priority, and writing is definitely part of that growth. I haven’t been writing very much lately, and that is fine. I’m not a fanatic about writing every day. I don’t have a writing group right now, and I’m much more interested in starting a reading group at the moment.

LR: Pier won the first Kundiman Book Prize. How has your involvement with Kundiman influenced you as a writer?

JO: Because I grew up in Hawaii, I really didn’t identify with the term Asian American. It wasn’t until I moved to the mainland that it even made sense to me. I really didn’t know that I was missing anything until I went to the Kundiman Retreat in 2006. I had been in many amazing and supportive workshops prior to that, but there was something present at the retreat that I had not ever experienced. I was so much more conscious of belonging and being an integral part of a group. With that sense of belonging came a different kind of confidence in myself. It was a confidence that was also a call to action because I learned that belonging was not automatic; it required that leap to be part of and to embrace community. I’ve had a few experiences that have given me more confidence in myself as a writer—and being part of Kundiman is one of them.

LR: Aside from Kundiman, what other resources would you recommend to emerging Asian American poets who might be either outside of, or freshly graduated from, the M.F.A.?

JO: Definitely look to Kundiman, but I would also say that everyone is a potential resource and friend, and don’t underestimate your own ability to create community wherever you are and with whoever happens to be around you.

LR: Do you have any new projects in the pipeline? If so, can you talk a little about them?

JO: I’m working on individual poems that aren’t intentionally part of a project. I remember a friend once telling me that my poems were noticeably absent of people. These newer poems have more people, more men in particular. I don’t quite know what to make of them yet, but I’ll find out.

Brenda Hillman | photo by Brett Hall Jones

Brenda Hillman has published eight collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press: White Dress (1985), Fortress (1989), Death Tractates (1992), Bright Existence (1993), Loose Sugar(1997), Cascadia (2001), Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), and Practical Water (2009), for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, and three chapbooks: Coffee, 3 A.M. (Penumbra Press, 1982); Autumn Sojourn (Em Press, 1995); and The Firecage (a+bend press, 2000). She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permisson: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). In 2010 she co-translated Jeongrye Choi’s book of poems, Instances, released by Parlor Press. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

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INSTANCES cover

LR: What attracted you to rendering translations of Jeongrye Choi’s poetry?

BH: I met her at Iowa at the International Writers Workshop, and it proved to be interesting and fruitful to work on her poetry with the other students who had some knowledge of Korean. When I found out she was working in Berkeley the following year, we were able to continue working on her poetry, but I needed help from several other people to complete the project. Wayne de Fremery, a Harvard PhD candidate in Korean Studies who lives in Seoul, had met Jeongrye before and agreed to do the transliterating for me and LTI Korea backed us financially. Poet Gillian Hamel served as an advisor and helped produce the manuscript and Byungwook Ryu designed it. Jon Thompson at Free Verse Editions and Dave Blakesley at Parlor Press were also instrumental to this work.

LR: You’ve done some translations before this book. Was there anything that interested you about Choi’s work in terms of the craft of her poetry specifically?

BH: I was interested mostly in her aesthetic and her commitment to the strangeness of the everyday. She has a perception of reality that’s not just run-of-the-mill surrealism. I know she’s doing a lot of language play in Korean, but because I don’t know the original language, I had to rely on what Wayne would tell me was going on. As far as I can tell, one of the things she does is use a lot of—not exactly punning—but she keeps the possibilities of language open so that things can be read as punning on different situations, and that really interested me. I tried to get that sense when we were rendering it into English. I think the quality of imagination is rendered really well, so the images do carry a lot of linguistic content. And the things that do translate well are the repetition and intimate forms of address that are open to the reader and can also be taken as an address to self. At times, you can’t tell whether she’s addressing herself or the reader, and I found that really appealing as well.

LR: Did you notice any particular differences in the cultural transformation of bringing a contemporary Korean poet to an American audience?

BH: There’s a bringing forth of a feminist, politically motivated and more populist poetry that speaks to everyday experience and that’s also considered more linguistically radical. I think she fits into that too. There’s an effort that might be in keeping with some of what has gone on in American avant-garde poetry, a continuance of the engagements with modernist fragmentary forms, and also with the psychological and with women’s issues.

She’s a very precise writer. I found it really interesting because I had two different experiences with translating in a span of two years. The first was with Poems from Above the Hill: Selected Poems of Asher Etwebi, a collection of work from a Libyan poet that I co-translated with Diallah Haidar. My experience with Jeongrye had to do more with discussions of how literal to be with the Korean because it’s really hard to be literal when the grammatical structures are so different, even in the way the sentence is maintained.

LR: In the introduction, you wrote that in Choi’s poetry “meaning is restless: it goes back and forth,” and Choi herself says that her work deals with “fragments of memories.” As I was reading, I also thought that a lot of her poems pull the reader in and out of time. In one poem she writes “time floats on the muddy water,” which seems to describe the experience for me reading her work. Did time and fragmentation affect your rendering of her poems?

BH: Wayne and I tried to work on the sentence structure, so it’s not as fragmented as someone like Barbara Guest. It is very disjunctive, where you’ll set up one thought paratactially next to a very different one. A better description of what Jeongrye does is that she puts fragmented thought into grammatical context. That’s how it was described to me from the transliterations. They were usually in disjunctive, fragmentary sentences. Jumpy is a good word.

LR: Going back to what you said about Choi having a sort of feminist or politically motivated bent to her work. Also, in the book’s introduction, you wrote that you find her work to be feminist “in an instructive way.” As a poet who also tackles issues of feminism in your own writing, and as an activist, how do you find her work to be instructive?

BH: She’s of a younger generation, and I feel in some way that American feminism has informed a lot of international poetry too. I feel instructed by her—maybe instructed is the wrong word—but a solidarity and sisterly-ness with her sense of quirkish freedom that reminds me of slightly previous feminism from the 1970s. Even though it fits into a sort of grouping, her mind is very playful. She’s wild. She has freedom of emotion, and she expresses a community with other women, like in her poem “Lebanese Emotion,” which is one of my favorites. She says:

Veiled women pass by
against a background of buildings pocketed by bombs exploding.
Hollowed eyes flashing; they come and go like gulls;
Maybe it was me.

She’s really getting at a condition of identification for all people in that poem, and identification with a difficult condition of the world through a more emotional approach—through the image that women are allowed to express more freely in all cultures. That draws me to her feminism.

LR: I know in your own work that you have a spiritual or mystical connection to the natural elements and that a current interest for you is eco-poetics. Does Jeongrye Choi’s work interest you on that spiritual or mystical level too?

BH: Again, that draws me to it because she has a playful connection to the nonhuman. For instance, she writes about crabs with one leg inside the hole. She writes poems to geese, and tigers, and frogs, and watermelons, even the moon gets a lot of attention and shadows. In my own eco-poetics, I’m more interested in naming things. Hers comes from more symbolic representations of trees, and plants, and animals, but they’re all animated in a way that involves an interaction with human imagination. She interacts with shadows that she mistakes for something else, and that makes it special.

Very often, those things are figures for either emotions or relationships. For her, I think relationships are problematic, and so the natural world, or the nonhuman world, is a way of entering into these human relationships with a different kind of symbolic figuration. There’s a poem called “A Forest of Donkey Ears” that I really love, in which the poet thinks she sees donkey ears, but it’s really leaves, and then it turns into memory and becomes a figure for the mistakes we make.

Like understanding the cry of the redpoll
only as the red of berries,
like something heard before
with a knitted brow—
Who was it? What was it?

If you can understand the animal or the nonhuman, then you can somehow get clearer on what’s often difficult for this poet.

LR: Do you think her work has universal appeal?

BH: Like all good poets, she works with local situations that get bigger as they become symbolic as a whole. Again, I think she’s speaking to women’s experiences that become representative of here’s how it is: to have children, to have different love affairs, to have hope in a dangerous situation. She’s on the border of dangerousness a lot, so there’s a sense of the universal. She writes of departure and love affairs that haven’t worked—it’s never quite clear why. I think she gets “universal” mileage of never saying the why but just saying the what.

With the where, I think of a poet like René Char who writes symbolically about living in the French countryside, but the places he talks about could be anywhere as opposed to someone who’s writing very specifically about one place. Then there are writers like Gary Snyder who write about their own locale, and you can extrapolate a lot from that. Jeongrye seems to me an urban, or suburban, poet because she writes about being in cities and seeing the things that are there in the city, or in the house. The editors constructed a statement on the back that says she “creates environments at once familiar but dreamlike,” and I think it’s a very good description actually.

I also like her statements at the end, and I sort of take her saying, “Now that I am alive and have a memory and can feel things deeply, I have to answer the questions of who I am, and where I am. So I write,” back to the question of women’s experience and poetic experience in the world. I like to have themes emerge in the brain. There’s a powerful nature of living in a symbolic world that teaches you more and gives you more material. It enriches reality to live very deeply and strangely and imagistically in the world. I wouldn’t say it’s only particular to her work, but poetry in general. The delicacy and intricacy of her poetics, like many poets who write conversationally offers a deeper, more vital way to live.

Kimiko Hahn, by Nancy Bareis

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight books of poems, including: Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006) a collection that takes its title from Basho’s famous poetic journal; and Toxic Flora, poems inspired by science (W.W. Norton, 2010). As part of her service to the CUNY community, she helped initiate a Chapbook Festival that has become an annual event; since then she has published the chapbooks, Ragged Evidence and A Field Guide to the Intractable. Hahn has also written text for film, such as the 1995 MTV special, Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She-Thing; also, the text for Everywhere at Once, a film based on Peter Lindbergh’s still photos and narrated by Jeanne Moreau. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, PEN/Voelcker Award, Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught in graduate programs at the University of Houston and New York University, and of course, in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York where she is a distinguished professor; also for literary organizations such as the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem and Kundiman. Among her current projects: a collaborative translation of Japanese zuihitsu and new sequences triggered primarily by neuroscience.

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TOXIC FLORA

LR: In the latest issue of The American Poetry Review featuring 13 of your new poems triggered by articles on science, you speak of the power of lists and the poetic momentum that can be generated by them in the context of individual poems. In Toxic Flora as a whole, how did you maintain a sense of urgency and intensity while using the same kind of source material (NYT science articles) for each piece?

KH: These poems are from a new manuscript that I began late summer of 2009 [i.e. not Toxic Flora]. I was preparing the Toxic Flora manuscript for publication and thinking that I was finished with science—but suddenly realized that science, at least the exotic language and realm, was not finished with me. I returned to several articles in the Science section of The New York Times and gave myself the assignments as described in APR.

Over ten years ago I wrote a sequence based on various articles (i.e., from [the] Science section of The New York Times). I soon had so many poems that I realized it could become a whole collection. So I kept writing—maybe over a hundred—and at a certain point began seriously revising. Then while compiling a manuscript, [I] began seriously cutting poems that were too weak. I have described the particular process in a W.W. Norton online column: “A Poet and Her Editor”.

LR: You are widely known as an exemplar of a poet who teaches. What relationship is there between your teaching and your writing?

KH: I take my students very seriously. I believe that is the greatest gift an artist can give a student. Obviously, if I hold a high standard for their work, say in the closure of a poem, I had better hold the same. I also find that I read a greater variety of poetry because I need to go beyond my own taste.

LR: What has been your experience teaching at Kundiman? From your perspective, why is it important to intentionally foster spaces of community for Asian American poets?

KH: There are cultural issues such as “saving face”/shame, rage/reticence, and so on that can censor a writer. These are in some respects stereotypes and do not apply to every Asian culture or every Asian American family. But I found similarities among those at the Kundiman retreat and I was grateful to be in the mix: to see how I fit in there and to be able to identify some of these aspects as cultural. Then to break open into rich discussions. Some were very painful. And equally necessary.

LR: How do you envision the roles of cultural and gender identity in your work?

KH: When I began writing seriously, the country was in the throes of the Civil Rights and Feminism Movements. Unlike some earlier writers of color, I didn’t feel that I had to write “like a white person”—like, say, T.S. Eliot. On the other hand, if I wanted to imitate Eliot, I also didn’t feel that I was betraying my growing sense of being an Asian American female. Maybe part of this comes from being mixed, i.e., Eurasian. In any case, I feel that whatever I write is going to have a cultural and gender imprint, directly or subtly. I can’t understand why this is an issue in 2011—to not want to be an Asian American writer—because it is not limiting. I feel extremely grateful that Toxic Flora was awarded an Asian American Literary Award from AAWW. The book isn’t obviously written by an Asian American writer—at least not typically so.

LR: How has motherhood affected your writing?

KH: I have an essay coming out called, “Still Writing the Body,” (Rankine, Claudia and Lisa Sewell, North American Women Poets in the 21st Century, Volume 2. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, Forthcoming, 2012). It is triggered by my abiding interest in French feminists’ “écriture féminine.” The mother’s body—which is to say my mother’s body and my own body as it is the mother—is an essential part of who I am. Why would I want my writing to be separate from my body? That would be to deny cadence and the texture of language! Not to mention genuine emotion.

On a practical level, and perhaps this is more your question, I had to compartmentalize my life very strictly to get any writing done. I hope in my driving ambition that I didn’t subject my children to my own madness. Hard to know where being a model ends and being a terrible-mother begins…. We are all three very loving towards one another so I think I hope! I was what is known as “the good enough mother.”

LR: Tell us about how you got your start in poetry. How was the poetry world different then? Would you have done anything differently?

KH: I’ve always loved the sound of words—even words that made no sense to me. In fact words that make little or no sense possess the kind of magic we expect in poetry. So, I’d say that I always loved poetry but truly fell in love with Edgar Allen Poe in third grade. My family was at an outdoor book fair and I found an old gilt-edged copy of Poe that my parents bought for me. My father kind of explained meter. On into high school, rock ‘n’ roll lyrics as well as Gertrude Stein, Eliot, and so on. Even in high school I knew that I wanted to become a writer and when I found that the University of Iowa had undergrad workshops off I went. I studied with Louise Glück, Marvin Bell, Charles Wright, as well as then-grad students Michael Burkard and Rita Dove. On graduation I returned to New York City and lived with my radical boyfriend who introduced me to social movements. I was introduced to a number of non-academic poets such as Sekou Sundiata and Jessica Hagedorn. You could work part time and find a run-down cheap apartment in Manhattan in the ’70s. It was a heady mix of studying Japanese at Columbia, radical politics, and clubbing. Overall: writing was at the center of my life. … What would I do differently? Hard to say. I wish I had stretched myself a bit and taken fiction workshops as an undergrad. I am sorry my Japanese is so rusty but I am collaborating on some translations now so I make [d0].

LR: You’ve written eight books so far. How do you move from one book to the next? How do you know when a book is finished?

KH: The collection is finished when I find myself doing other stuff. Then it’s time to arrange and rearrange; to show writer friends what I have; to revise even more. It’s been different for each book. Although I am not interested in “an idea book,” that is, a book that is made specifically with a project in mind, the fact is that I often work with a theme or focus or preoccupation in mind.

LR: How have your writing and your writing process evolved since you started writing?

KH: I noticed early on that the writers I really loved to read—such as Charles Wright—were working out their own styles. They have been teachers and models. My own writing initially evolved just from writing a lot; then, in The Artist’s Daughter and Toxic Flora I began to hammer out particular aesthetic concerns (as described in that APR). I am finding formal elements that have a lot of give.

LR: What advice would you offer to emerging poets?

KH: When asked this question, I always reply: toss out the map.

LR: Can you tell us about what you’re working on now?

KH: I have several writing projects: a collection of “fake journals” inspired by the Japanese poetic diaries (nikki); a translation collaboration; and a collection of new poems triggered by science articles (APR poems are an example). There are a few other projects, but these are the ones that I’ve prioritized. Thank you for asking!

Jenna Le

Jenna Le was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the youngest child of two Vietnam War refugees. She obtained her B.A. in mathematics from Harvard University and her M.D. from Columbia University. Her first book of poetry, Six Rivers, was published by New York Quarterly Books in August 2011. Her poems and translations of French poetry have been published by Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, The Nervous Breakdown, Post Road, The Raintown Review, Salamander, Sycamore Review, and other journals.

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LR: Many of the poems in Six Rivers riff on classical characters and themes while preserving a conversational use of language. Likewise, you often work in form while eschewing formal language. What do such dualities aim to achieve?

SIX RIVERS

JL: Many of the characters in Greek mythology seem quite real to me, especially the sorceresses like Circe and Medea, who in my mind embody the tragicomic situation of the 21st-century woman who is brimming with intellectual resourcefulness but who is still anguished by her dating troubles. Like, I see Circe as a sort of precursor to Napoleon Dynamite: although she had plenty of “great skills….like nunchuck skills, bow-hunting skills, and computer-hacking skills,” she was still totally hapless when it came to romantic relationships. This is such a thoroughly modern theme that it only makes sense for me to talk about it in colloquial contemporary English.

I use traditional verse forms for much the same reason: because I feel they have a lot of relevance to our modern-day plight. The tanka, for example, is a verse form that was historically used by aristocratic Japanese poets to treat such subject matter as clandestine assignations with illicit lovers. Well, I always thought it would be interesting to repurpose this verse form and use it to address contemporary sexual practices that really don’t differ all that much from ancient ones (“hooking up,” etc.).

LR: There is a strong geographical trope in your book with literal journeys along rivers that are both real and fictional. How do these journeys serve your narrative?

JL: Well, immigration and displacement played big roles in my family history. All the journeys in my book recapitulate that, in a way. And, in a way, it’s this small-scale recapitulation of a large-scale narrative of escape, of striking out on one’s own in an unfamiliar and sometimes hypo-oxygenated territory, that drives the narrative of Six Rivers.

LR: Your poems often view myth, history and geography through the prism of the personal, that is, the speaker’s point of view as a Vietnamese American female physician. Tell us how you balance all those perspectives and what the melange confers to the politics of your storytelling.

JL: The “politics” of my storytelling are rooted in the personal, yes. My intent is not to make political statements per se, but to spin yarns and to massage language until it moans. I ask: is a poem in which a fictional couple contemplates having an abortion “political”? Or is it just another kind of love poem? (Or is it both?)

LR: There seems to be a tension between the natural and the unnatural, health and disease in your book. On the surface, this preoccupation appears to relate to your “day job”, but on a deeper level, what story does it tell?

JL: I’ve always had a somewhat morbid fascination with the unnatural, I guess. It’s something instinctual, universal, like how I involuntarily shudder when I see a peanut shell that contains more than two seeds. It’s a kind of rubbernecking, but a rubbernecking that looks inward as well as outward.

LR: What have your experiences been as a poet who identifies as both Asian American and female? Have you found that this has placed you into a “niche” in publishing, and if so, have you found this to be reductive or empowering?

JL: Yes, I occasionally find myself being labeled by other people as an “Asian-American poet” or “Asian-American female poet” (although perhaps not as often as I feel pressured to wear the label of “physician-poet”). These labels, obviously, don’t spring out of nowhere, and I’m somewhat complicit in their use: after all, it’s true that I write primarily from a female perspective and that my writing is inevitably inflected by my Asian heritage and my Asian-American upbringing, just as it is unavoidably influenced by my past job experiences and sundry other autobiographical factors. Still, when you get down to it, the stuff I try to write is poetry, not Asian-American female poetry.

I’m conflicted. On the one hand, like any female writer who’s ever used a male or neuter pseudonym (I’m thinking of Charlotte Bronte who published her first novel under the pseudonym “Currer Bell” in 1847, as well as of Joanne Rowling who published her first novel under the moniker “J.K. Rowling” 150 years later), I want my writing to be taken seriously for what it is, and I aspire for my writing to reach a large mixed audience.

On the other hand, I am cognizant of the fact that some of the people who have responded most warmly to the publication of my book have been Asians and Asian-Americans, and I am enormously grateful for their support and their exuberant expressions of fellow-feeling. Moreover, I remember how hard it was to grow up as a Vietnamese-American girl in the 1980s with relatively few Asian-American female poets to turn to as role models. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there are no Asian-American women represented in the Norton Anthology of Poetry to this very day.) If, by accepting the label of “Asian-American female poet,” I can help bolster the confidence of other aspiring young Asian-American female poets, I am happy to do it.

LR: With a BA in mathematics followed by an MD, your entry into the poetry world was unorthodox. How did you come to poetry and how did you navigate its murky waters?

JL: Literature was my first love. I began seriously reading and writing poetry as a preteen, in an effort to break free from the shackles of the sterile perfectionism that was threatening to ruin my life. In the years that followed, I continued reading poetry, writing poetry, taking poetry classes, and asking other poets for feedback on my writing. By exercising what meager time-management skills I possess, I was able to continue doing this in parallel with my other major life pursuits.

LR: Did you consider doing an MFA? Why did you choose not to, and how has that choice impacted your poetry career?

JL: I toyed with the idea of doing an MFA. In the end, it just didn’t jive with my other plans, temporally or financially or family-wise. Not doing an MFA has doubtless handicapped me, in terms of making connections, freeing up time for writing, etc. On the other hand, not “going the MFA route” has given me interesting life experiences, an increased amount of economic security, and an outsider’s perspective on po-biz, and I console myself with the delusion that these are worthwhile things to have.

LR: What advice would you give to poets who are trying to break into po-biz from the outside, both for journal and book publishing?

JL: When your work is truly ready to be published, betake yourself to the internet, which houses such helpful resources as duotrope and Jeffery Bahr’s online guide to print journals. These websites will give you a sense of which journals are a good fit for your work, as well as which journals have high visibility and will give you the best exposure. Keep tabs on other poets who are at a slightly more advanced stage in their career than you, but who have similar backgrounds or similar writing styles to you; make note of which journals they’ve been published in, and then submit your poems to those very same journals.

Based on my personal experiences which led up to the publication of Six Rivers, I believe that the importance of “making connections” can’t be underestimated. Don’t just schmooze with industry insiders at barbecues and book fairs, but actually give them time to get to know you, e.g., by volunteering as an editorial assistant for a literary magazine that you respect. Giving poetry readings is another good way to make yourself visible to well-placed people in the book-publishing field.

LR: What is your writing process?

JL: To me, the most important thing is making a commitment to sit down and work on my writing on a regular basis. I find it useful to set quantitative goals for myself: e.g., “I’m going to write at least 10 lines of poetry this evening.” Sometimes, when I find myself lacking “inspiration,” I ask current MFA students what writing assignments their workshop teachers have given them lately, and then I give them to myself as “homework.” I enjoy giving myself assignments that force me to step outside my comfort zone, be it in terms of subject matter or formal qualities.

Other times, I’ll aimlessly page through encyclopedias (Wikipedia is fair game!) and quietly take heed of which weird factoids grab my attention in spite of myself. Then I’ll try to use those loose strands to build the nest for a yet-to-be-hatched poem.

LR: In addition to original poems, you also do translations. Do you see them as different art forms? How do translating and multilingualism in general affect your own work?

JL: I view poems and translations as different art forms, albeit closely related ones: after all, isn’t it common practice nowadays for poets to do “homolinguistic translations” as a means of generating new original poems?

Doing translations has made me a more attentive reader of other people’s poetry, and it’s heightened my awareness of the subtle literary techniques that other writers use. It’s also brought me closer, emotionally, to such great writers as Nerval, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé.

Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh is the author of three books of poems, including the recently published Seven Studies for a Self Portrait (Bench Press). His poetry has appeared in Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press) and Best Gay Poetry (A Midsummer’s Night Press), and in journals such as Cimarron Review and PN Review. Born and raised in Singapore, he lives in New York City, and blogs at Song of a Reformed Headhunter.

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LR: Seven Studies for a Self Portrait is divided into seven chapters, with seven poems in each chapter, and forty-nine in the last. What is the significance of the number seven?

SEVEN STUDIES FOR A SELF PORTRAIT

JLK: Seven days in a week. The practice of writing a poem a day is important to me. The days when I don’t write feel empty to me, incoherent, lost. A day, like a poem, is invaluable for itself and also for being a part of something larger, like a week or a life. I wrote my first book Payday Loans, a series of 30 sonnets, in the month before I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with my MFA.

One of my favorite poets, Philip Larkin, asks in a poem, “What are days for?” He answers himself, as poets have the habit of doing, “Days are where we live.” A day is an on-going project. At the moment I am reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. She speaks of Nietzsche’s will to power as a project of self-transcendence. When Larkin considers transcendence, he says in his typically sardonic manner that the question brings the priest and the doctor running. Because I have lost my faith in organized religion and have yet to place my life in the hands of medical science, I am working out my daily transcendence in writing poetry.

I wrote Seven Studies for a Self Portrait in two years. As I wrote, the number seven acquired and transformed its Christian meanings—the days of Creation, the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Eshuneutics, who reviewed my book, puts it well, “This silent structuring … evokes a tradition running from the mediaeval period and sets a context for the spiritual enquiries within the book.” Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, from which my book got its epigraph, was an inspiration for the post-Christian enquiry.

As vital as the spiritual quest was for me, so was the musical composition that the number enabled. A sequence of seven poems has not only a beginning and an end, but also a well-defined middle. It also breaks up into two unequal parts—four and three—half of the sonnet’s proportions. The first six sequences in fact culminate in two sonnet sequences, one English, the other Italian. Breaking through and re-working that framework is the final set of 49 ghazals, each made up of seven couplets about love. The ghazals raise, in my imagination, a 7 x 7 x 7 cube. In planning this structure, I was thinking very much of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, in particular, the last game that the Magister Ludi builds from the floor plan of a Japanese house.

LR: The poems in Seven Studies for a Self Portrait are chiefly concerned with different ways of viewing the multiple facets of the self, simulacratically, if you will. What was the motivation behind this preoccupation? Were you affected by the new social media?

JLK: To speak biographically, my life is broken up in various ways. I moved from Singapore to New York in 2003, at the age of 33. I left behind family, friends and career in order to build a new life for myself. This new life does not only include the poetic vocation, but also a new identity as a gay man. I wrote about the experience of coming out as gay and expatriate in my second book Equal to the Earth. But Singapore will not go away. I need distance from it to write about it, but writing does not close the distance between me and the bookish child I was, the Bible-thumping adolescent, or the ruler-wielding teacher. Living in the States has deepened my perceptions about race, ethnicity, gender and class. These perceptions have sharpened my understanding of society, but turned inwards, they cut up the self into multiple fragments. Again and again I hear the same debates about whether one should identify as a gay poet, a woman poet, an Asian American poet or what have you. I find it near impossible to give an answer in prose. I prefer to let my poetry speak. I find in writing what Frost calls “a momentary stay against confusion.” I would add, however, that being gay is vital to my poetry, in ways that being Chinese and Singaporean are not. It is my motive force. It orders my creative agenda.

EQUAL TO THE EARTH

I consider myself a lyric poet living in an anti-lyric age. The illusions of the lyric “I” have been well catalogued: the simulation of psychic wholeness, the privileging of atemporality, the masking of social injustice, the marginalization of the Other. The new social media reinforce the fragmentation of the self. And yet I think the lyric answers to some very deep human need for complex music made by the human voice. By looking at the self in various ways, I try in Seven Studies to rework the lyric for our highly self-conscious times.

I look at the self through various lenses in the book. The title sequence is written after master self-portraits—Dürer, Rembrandt, van Gogh, Schiele, Kahlo, Warhol and Yasumasa Morimura. In contrast, the second sequence “Profiles” sketches the self sideways. “I Am My Names” is a series of riddles. “What We Call Vegetables” describes the organic basis of identity. I “translate” an unknown Mexican poet in one sequence, and speak as Ted Haggard, the Evangelical pastor accused of paying for gay sex, in another. The fragmentation of the self follows the example of Roland Barthes in the final ghazals, where I beg to be reconstituted by a lover-reader.

LR: Born in Singapore, educated in England, and living in America, some might call you a “gay transnational Asian poet.” That’s a lot of labels!  Have you found such multiplicity freeing or constricting? How has your transnationalism affected your poetic career? Has it opened doors, allowing you to maintain inroads in England and Singapore as well as America?

JLK: If “transnational” means beyond the nation-state, I am all for it. On a lecture tour of the United States, Rabindranath Tagore told his American audience, “The idea of the Nation is one of the most powerful anaesthetics that man has invented.” The writer of Gitanjali, beloved in his own country, was critical of the blinkers of nationalism. I like to think that nothing human is alien to me. That I could potentially inherit everything human.

Certainly, moving to New York City has given me access to writing groups, editors and curators whom I could not possibly reach, or even know, from Singapore. Besides New York, I have read in Boston, Salem and New Orleans, and taken up writing residencies at Marilyn Nelson’s Soul Mountain Retreat and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center in Nebraska City. I have also attended and benefited from the Kundiman writing retreat. The infrastructure for supporting writers here is incredibly extensive and well established compared to that in Singapore, and probably many other countries. American writers are very lucky.

I try to keep up with the Singapore literary scene, which is small but active. I return home regularly to participate in the Pride month reading.  Last summer a local bookstore organized a book launch for Seven Studies. The quality of poetry coming out of Singapore now is under-recognized in the States. Cyril Wong, Alvin Pang, Aaron Lee,  Hsien Min Toh, Alfian Sa’at, Li Sui Gwee, and Yi-sheng Ng all deserve to be better known. At the most recent conference of the Association of Asian American Studies, there was no academic paper on Singapore literature, though there was one on Singapore film. Singapore literature can be usefully studied as part of the “transnational” approach.

I am certainly not the only Singaporean writer living in New York City. Hwee Hwee Tan, who published her first work of fiction Foreign Bodies at the age of 22, lives here too. Wena Poon, whose first book Lions in Winter was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize (Ireland) and whose poetry was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize (UK), divides her time between New York City and Austin. So residency in the States is no barrier to recognition in the UK and Ireland, such is the fluidity of transatlantic networks.

Other Singaporean writers have taken other routes. Poet Kim Cheng Boey migrated to Australia and now teaches at the University of Newcastle. Yew Leong Lee, who edits the exciting new international journal Asymptote, has just moved to Taiwan. The last example is perhaps indicative of a growing trend, that of journals and writers developing an international focus. We want to hear not just news but voices from all over a world growing rapidly smaller and more connected. Boey’s journal Mascara started out with a focus on Asian, Australian and Indigenous writers, but has since added an international section.

LR: You have now self-published three books and mastered the art of promotion. How has that process changed from book to book? How did you carve out an audience for yourself as a self-publisher? How did you stake your claim to critical legitimacy?

JLK: My first book Payday Loans was actually published by a small press in Hoboken, New Jersey. Working with Roxanne Hoffman the publisher gave me some idea of the workings of an independent press. I decided to self-publish my next book Equal to the Earth, and so set up my own imprint, Bench Press, for that purpose. I published Equal with Lulu print-on-demand but changed to Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand for Seven Studies in order to sell my book on Amazon Marketplace. I really enjoy having total control over the publication of my books, working with a professional book designer to decide on the cover, layout and font. I threw an on-line book party for Equal at which I read aloud from the book and answered questions “live” on the book blog. Seven Studies was launched early this year at two house parties and a reading at Cornelia Street Café in NYC.

To build an audience for my books, I keep an active literary blog called Song of a Reformed Headhunter and a steady presence on Goodreads, Facebook, and Twitter. I also read and sell my books at the annual Rainbow Book Fair and, this year, at the Brooklyn Book Festival. I am a regular at the Son of a Pony reading at Cornelia Street Café, and people hear me or hear of me that way. My sales target is very modest: I aim to recover my publishing cost so that I can self-publish my next book. It took me some time to wear the hats of poet and publisher comfortably, but the satisfactions of working for oneself are rewarding.

In the brave new world of on-line publishing, the sources of critical legitimacy are more widely dispersed. On-line journals and groups are multiplying, and they gather around them a community of contributors and readers. I send my books to editors who have accepted my poems for publication. The relationship is reciprocal: they support my work and my work, in turn, supports theirs. I now have three reviewers who follow my work from book to book.

I also submit my books to the Lambda Literary Awards. Though Equal did not win last year, I was asked to join the judging panel for this year’s gay male poetry prize. It is a pity, I think, that the Asian American Literary Awards do not consider self-published entries. As my judging experience with Lambda can attest, it takes next to no time to separate a vanity press product from a serious literary production. I hope the Asian American Writers’ Workshop will review this rule, so as to keep in step with the changing times. I predict more and more serious writers will turn to self-publishing.

LR: What individuals (or entities) most influenced your poetic career and what were their best pieces of advice?

JLK: I did not think a Singaporean poet could both write well and write on matters close to my heart until I chanced upon Kim Cheng Boey’s Days of No Name in a bookshop. The book travels from [the] Iowa International Writing Program to San Francisco to Germany, while rejoicing in the painful pleasures of friendship, love and art. The other Singaporean poet whose work I love and measure myself against is Cyril Wong. His poetry is one of deep interiority. Unlike many of us, he has chosen to stay at home, in Singapore, and is producing an extraordinary body of work.

Stephen Dobyns at Sarah Lawrence College was very generous with his time and attention. I have internalized his call for clarity in intention and communication. His Best Words, Best Order is still one of the best primers around on writing poetry. John Stahle, who passed away last year, encouraged me to take the leap into self-publication. He designed Equal to the Earth and the Bench Press logo. Andrew Howdle, who lives in Leeds, England, has proven the worth of a virtual friendship many times over. I rely on his critical acumen.

Michael Schmidt has been publishing my work regularly in the British journal PN Review. He has also included me in the forthcoming Carcanet anthology, New Poetries V. A less obvious way in which he has influenced my career is his editorship of Eleven British Poets, the school text that introduced me to Philip Larkin.

Best advice? That must come from Poetry Free-for-all, an on-line poetry workshop to which I have belonged for nine years. I have learned so much from the international community there. One of the workshop moderators has condensed her wisdom into what she calls Scavella’s Mantra. It goes, “I am not as good as I think I am.” If that is not Asian, I don’t know what is.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three books of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and Requiem for the Orchard. He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry with Stacey Lynn Brown, and co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. A recipient of grants from NYFA and the Artists’ Trust, his recent work has appeared in the New England Review, Sentence, the Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing and literature at Western Washington University.

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LR: Who were your earliest influences as a young poet? Was there a momentous decision to pursue this career?

OP: I’ve got a lot of early influences so I’ll name a number of firsts. My very first poetry book was The Selected Poems of Robert Penn Warren. When my parents first arrived in the U.S. they became subscribers to Readers’ Digest and part of the subscription deal was to receive three gift books with their subscription. One of the gift books was Robert Penn Warren’s book. So apart from my mother’s medical texts, I was pouring over Robert Penn Warren’s poems, not really understanding what was happening in them, but having a profound curiosity over the work.

The first poetry books that I ever purchased for myself were for a poetry class in college. I bought Galway Kinnell’s Book of Nightmares and Adrienne Rich’s Atlas of a Difficult World. The poetry collection that really opened my eyes to the sonic qualities a poem could have was Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. I still have the first two tercets memorized: “The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat./ The fat/ Sacrifices its opacity . . . ”

The first poetic influence that affirmed I could be a poet was Li-Young Lee’s first book, Rose. I was deciding between continuing a career in the sciences, or pursuing poetry. At the time, I was a care provider in a supported living home for the developmentally disabled and an EMT. I had a lot of time to read because the main client I worked with slept a lot due to the meds. So I read long into my shift. I imagine that was when I decided to pursue the life of letters. I wasn’t really excited about the lab work or the medical work I was doing, and I was feeling quite invigorated by all the poetry I was reading.

LR: “Drama is danger / plus desire, a teacher said.” What are your dangers and desires?

OP: My real life dangers—chainsaws and cancer. I’m not kidding about the chainsaws. I bought a Stihl chainsaw with a 25” bar, and I’m absolutely terrified of the thing. There are a lot of trees that are downed around my property that I haven’t properly disposed. One of the sure-fire things that occurs in this part of the Pacific Northwest is the seasonal wind gusts every Fall. Couple the windy weather with soaked ground from all the rain and you get a lot of downed pine trees. Anyway, all the locals had filled my head with horror stories of how a chain slipped off a bar and whipped across someone’s face or how a chainsaw tooth got lodged into someone’s hand and jerked back into their midsection. Understand that this is why I am afraid of my chainsaw.

I’m afraid of cancer, too. I was diagnosed with papillary thyroid cancer in 2007, which is a fairly common and highly treatable form of cancer. What was scary and particularly dangerous about my cancer was the size of the tumor. It was found on the left side of my neck and was roughly the size of a golf ball. I hadn’t noticed it, surprisingly. My mother spotted it while my wife and I were visiting her in Oregon. My mother reached across the table and pressed down on the knot as soon as she saw it. As I mentioned, papillary cancer is a fairly common and treatable form of cancer, but because of this tumor’s size, there was a possibility that it had spread. I went through a mild chemo treatment for a year after my thyroid was removed. The messy part wasn’t the surgery, it was the loss of the thyroid. It’s amazing what the thyroid does for the body. I went through a bout of weakness and insomnia as the doctors were trying to adjust my replacement hormone levels. I realize I’m probably over-sharing, but you asked the question.

As far as my desires are concerned, my current desires are that my children grow up wise, healthy, and happy. Of course, before I had children, I had different desires—namely to find a way to sustain myself as a writer. My desire to sustain myself through writing has shifted these days. I’m less concerned about sustaining myself as a writer and more concerned about assisting in sustaining writers’ communities. In particular, my hope is that Kundiman can become a self-sustaining organization. Under the wisdom and guidance of Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi along with Vikas Menon, Jennifer Chang, and Purvi Shah, I think it’s in good hands. Additionally, I hope that the students I teach in my creative writing classes continue to write long after they’ve finished their undergraduate and graduate college careers.

LR: As your books progress they seem to develop toward frank self-exposure. Names Above Houses has a fabulic narrative distance; in Furious Lullaby, you start to orbit spiritual questions; and by the time we get to Requiem for the Orchard we see the self-portraits and childhood memories. Was this a conscious aesthetic move, or did it simply happen?

OP: Each book came about as a way to escape the process of its predecessor. In other words, I had to relearn how to write a poem for each project. It was absolutely a conscious effort. I knew, after writing Names Above Houses, I could keep writing the same type of fabulist prose poem and it would be very easy to remain in the voice and the tone of that work, but I was bored of the process. It was getting to the point where there wasn’t much active imagination happening during the writing of some of the later poems, and the fact that it was becoming too easy became the impetus for me to stop writing prose poems for a while.

I then attempted writing short lyrics, which you see in the middle section of Furious Lullaby. I had been reading a lot of Paul Celan to get back into the mode of the short lyric. It was the tail end of my time as a graduate student at Arizona State University, and I was working with Norman Dubie, who has the most incredible imagination. He was “seeding” the second book for me by offering me various assignments that ultimately show up in some of the aubades that fill the book. Also during this time, I was re-learning how to put together a manuscript. It was relatively easy to construct Names Above Houses because it’s a linear manuscript which is character driven. Furious Lullaby took awhile to assemble and went through numerous drafts. I had started the manuscript in 1999 and didn’t have it published until 2007. It did the rounds at all the various contests, and I learned a heck of a lot about how to structure a manuscript. While Furious Lullaby was circulating, I wasn’t writing. I probably should’ve put pen to paper, but a number of things were happening in my life. I had gotten married, I got a new job, I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I didn’t have time to espouse a new obsession.

Unlike the other two books, in Requiem for the Orchard I wanted to explore a voice that was much more self-reflexive. The sum total of returning to the West, becoming a parent, and having more time to write triggered a creative surge that hasn’t seemed to abate. Requiem for the Orchard was written during a relatively short period—between 2007 and 2009. The poems were written relatively close together, so the tonal level, the themes, all of it was fairly uniform. I needed to get a handle on my cancer recovery and my new fatherhood, so the poems took shape as I was trying to avoid pathos. In order to trick myself away from writing the overly sentimental poem, I gave myself assignments. All those “Self Portrait” poems are the result of many assignments, and the titles are giveaways for the specific prompt I had given. The titles ultimately became a guide for the structuring of the book.

LR: In an old interview (from 2006), you said that after Names Above Houses you became more deliberate in your writing, connecting poems by sequence or theme. How does inspiration figure into this process?

OP: Inspiration is always a factor during this process, but I don’t believe inspiration comes out of the aether. I firmly believe that all art is dialogic, that it’s in conversation with something that is occurring in the culture or in the artist’s life at the time. So in the case of my writing, I apply the same idea to a poem that I may be writing. After it has been written, I explore whether it is conversant with other works that I have written. If it isn’t, then I imagine the possibilities of a poem that could have a conversation with it and set about crafting that poem.

I’ve heard that such a process may foster the composition of flat poems that can’t survive on their own without its cohort, but that’s where revision comes in.

Additionally, my writing process is compact and fairly economical. I don’t write during nine months out of the year. During the three months that I am writing, I write in short, intense bursts. What happens during those little bursts is that my mind won’t have time to shift from one idea or subject to the next, so I continue writing on that subject. I mentioned in your previous question that I give myself assignments. The assignments I give myself are also thematic guidelines. I tend to imagine a sequence of poetry as paintings that are to be hung in a gallery for an exhibition. There is a narrative that occurs when you go to a gallery to view paintings on a wall. Certain paintings cannot be placed adjacent to each other. Certain paintings demand their own wall. Architecture. Form. These concepts all demand that there be some form of inspiration at work. What’s particular to the architect or even the gallery curator is the idea of utility—there is a functionality that must exist within the design. The building must be designed so that the plumbing can reach the top of the tower. The gallery display must be arranged so that the patrons of the gallery enter the gallery and proceed through the exhibit in a particular manner.

LR: You make beautiful use of flight—sometimes deformed or aberrant—as theme and image. Requiem for the Orchard ends with this self-portrait: “Now, where once resided // acrimony for youth’s black seed—nothing except a single wing / opening and closing and opening again to catch the wind.” It reminds me of Fidelito when he’s broken his wrist, and his mother “feels his unsteady pulse and shields her one-winged son.” Can you say something about the single wing?

OP: I’ll try. This is a difficult question because it’s something that I’m still muddling through. The image of the single wing renders the violence of the speaker’s upbringing in concrete and uncompromising terms. An animal is mutilated at the hands of children who are trying to become men by driving a tractor they have no business driving. And yet, what closes the poem is the image of a child raising his arms, wanting to be picked up by his father who had been one of the children driving the tractor. So, in this case and in the case of many of my poems, the idea of flight for me is the idea that despite the past, there remains a possibility of grace.

I also have to mention, as an immigrant and son of immigrants, “flight” symbolism is almost always charged with the idea of fleeing from something. In the case of my family, we left the Philippines during the 70’s “brain drain” of that country, when President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. My father always tells me that we left the Philippines in order to have more opportunities. He holds on to this narrative still to this day. The idea of the single wing, in this sense, could suggest all the ways in which we hold on to an idea and how that idea tries to raise itself into the air.

LR: As a “poet-citizen,” what do you see as the relationship between aesthetic and social pragmatism?

OP: I see that they are concurrent and congruent. Art is a societal need, though some will always argue that art is impractical. One thing that I have always believed—art engages its audience in an active and dialogical way.

I believe in the power of dialogue. Whether that dialogue take the form of a painting or a poem is not my central concern. I myself draw much inspiration from the visual arts as well as literature. Many of my poems were inspired by the visual arts.

There is always a danger in categorizing things according to their usefulness. That happens so much and we’re seeing it now with this economic crisis—various legislatures are determining what should be cut based on use and usefulness. Art has the ability to foster creative and critical thinking. So when legislatures determine to cut the budgets of art programs or community programs, they are essentially diminishing the possibility for their constituents’ long-term civic involvement.

LR: You mentioned the Hoagland-Rankine issue on your blog. Rather than pressure you for a stance: can you say a bit about Asian American poetry and literature in general, and community/readership?

OP: It’s okay to pressure me. I was quite cheesed off by Hoagland’s poem and his response to Claudia’s poetic response, but for the longest time, I couldn’t articulate my displeasure. I was in the audience at AWP when Claudia Rankine had Nick Flynn read Hoagland’s piece. She then read her piece and the ensuing responses. There was a palpable tension in the air and I felt like I had been punched in the neck. After Claudia had finished, a number of poets gave her a standing ovation.

I’ve always been one to step back before responding to anything that coaxes such a visceral response. I’m still grappling with the “conversation.” So here’s where I’m at today, and my feelings can change depending on what sets me off. Art, for me, is governed by choices. There are decisions and micro decisions that go into the composition of a poem, and what irked me about Hoagland’s response to Claudia is that it seemed like he decided to disengage and ultimately divorced himself from holding any responsibility for his poem, fortifying himself with the argument that the role of the artist is simply to make art and that we are not to confuse the speaker with the artist. Sure, but as I mentioned, I believe art is governed by choice as is how we interact with said art. Claudia knew where he was coming from. She understood his rhetorical stance and countered it eloquently. Tony, it seemed, didn’t understand where Claudia was coming from, unfortunately, and I don’t feel his response was as rhetorically accommodating. High jinx ensued. So we’ve had responses and counter responses. Ultimately, the writing community is taking Claudia Rankine’s challenge on and proposing discussions, talks, the opportunity for dialogue.

With respect to Asian American poetry, literature, and the community, I have always felt a responsibility to that community. When I was starting as a writer I sought community. One of the first poets I contacted was Fatima Lim Wilson. She persuaded me to contact Nick Carbo. Nick mentored me for many years, putting me in touch with many of the writing friends I have now. Community is self-generative provided that the constituents of said community wish to sustain that community. I had mentioned one of my desires is that Kundiman become a self-sustaining community, and in many ways it has become just that. Many of the fellows who leave the retreat maintain their community by corresponding and collaborating with each other over the years. And let me also say that there is a need for communities like Kundiman, Kearny Street Workshop, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Macondo, Canto Mundo, and Cave Canem. First off, the life of a writer is a lonely one. The life of a minority writer is extremely lonely. As I was in the process of searching for community, I couldn’t go to my family because they were new immigrants and their view of a successful career path for me certainly didn’t involve the arts. So it’s important for the new generation of minority artists to see that they have predecessors, even models. Li-Young Lee was my first model. He led me to Garrett Hongo’s anthology, The Open Boat. Garrett’s anthology led me to contact Fatima Lim Wilson who led me to contact Nick Carbo. All the while, I was unsure about the writing life as a life.

What’s clear now is there are a number of really fantastic young Asian American writers out there—Esther Lee, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Melody Gee, Neil Aitken, Purvi Shah just to name a few Asian American poets with new books . . . and the difference between when I was coming into my own as a writer and what they are experiencing is that they know each other through various community experiences but particularly Kundiman.

LR: Advice for a young poet?

OP: Read as much poetry as you can, no matter the style or the school. It’s important not to lock onto one particular writing style at this point because it’s important to experiment with the possibilities of your aesthetic. It’s also important to seek a poetic community that will challenge and sustain you, whether that community is a writing group, a couple of friends who share your passion for writing, or a writing organization. You never know when you’ll encounter a moment when the solitary writing life calls you away from the desk and out into the open air.