{"id":9058,"date":"2022-08-25T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2022-08-25T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=9058"},"modified":"2022-08-25T08:39:14","modified_gmt":"2022-08-25T15:39:14","slug":"setting-the-table-with-more-possibilities-a-conversation-with-e-j-koh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/25\/setting-the-table-with-more-possibilities-a-conversation-with-e-j-koh\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cSetting the Table With More Possibilities\u201d: A Conversation with E. J. Koh\ufffc"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"LR:<\/a>
E. J. Koh and the cover of her memoir, THE MAGICAL LANGUAGE OF OTHERS. Author photo by Adam K. Glaser<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This summer, I had the privilege of speaking with E. J. Koh about her memoir, <\/em>The Magical Language of Others<\/a>, (Tin House, 2020) as well as her background in poetry and translation. Koh is also the author of poetry collection <\/em>A Lesser Love<\/a>, (LSU Press, 2017) and the novel <\/em>The Liberators, forthcoming in 2023. Her poem \u201cHysteria\u201d<\/a><\/em> appeared in Issue 9.3 of <\/em>Lantern Review. Read on for her thoughts on the power of language, writing in different modes and genres, setting the table with multifarious possibilities, and more. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LANTERN REVIEW: <\/strong>In your memoir, both your college poetry teacher, Joe, and college poetry mentor, Joy, comment on your initial poetry\u2019s lack of \u201cmagnanimity.\u201d At the section\u2019s close, you write, \u201c[Joy] encouraged me to look closely, and said poetry would teach me how to pay attention and show me how to care. I must choose love over any other thing. Then, the world would open up for me.\u201d As you\u2019ve continued to grow in your career and craft, even beyond the memoir, have you found this advice\u2014that the practice of caring for one\u2019s craft as a poet is ultimately an exercise in magnanimity\u2014to be true? And is your goal to write one thousand love letters<\/a> an extension of that same practice of magnanimity? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

E. J. KOH: <\/strong>The lesson came around again for my memoir. I had to reckon with the choices I was making on the page. I could put in a scene to argue for my disappointment, for who I\u2019ve become because of what happened to me, but I replaced it with one that challenges how things could\u2019ve been different from what I assumed to know. During a time it was difficult to love, I\u2019d started writing love letters and hadn\u2019t noticed a connection with my work. I wonder if my everyday life is the actual work, and the rest is an extension of how I am living. But writing the letters has given me other lessons. For one, the word stranger<\/em> has become stranger to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LR: <\/strong>You recently announced that you will be publishing your first novel, The Liberators, <\/em>in the summer\/fall of 2023, which is really exciting news. Originally, you began your writing career as a poet, and you detail that journey in The Magical Language of Others<\/a>. <\/em>Has your background in poetry been influential as you\u2019ve begun experimenting with prose? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EJK: <\/strong>I was watching my old friend walk into my home, and I thought I saw another person they had been and yet another person they would be, all three of them walking together inside. I would read it on a page, and it could be called a device\u2014a thing to be used\u2014and it can be. But it is also life, isn\u2019t it? Writing tries to do what our lives do so effortlessly. The form seems determined by the force.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LR: <\/strong>Language, obviously, is a central focus in the book. It\u2019s something you study and learn and then pull apart to reveal the intergenerational language used for trauma but also the healing in the language of love. And then, of course, the memoir itself is called The Magical<\/em> Language of Others. <\/em>In the book, you observe that \u201c[l]anguages, as they open you, can also allow you to close.\u201d How have you noticed language structuring, opening or closing, your relationships with others or with yourself? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EJK: <\/strong>I was meditating every morning and evening. Some days for five hours. Like it was with languages, I was using meditation to close. I realized I was not waging peace but war. Isn\u2019t it another thing to go outside\u2014to go into those uncertain situations and places? So I try to use meditation, as with my language, to remain open. I welcome my fears because they work diligently to unravel me. I want to look at the things I\u2019m scared of seeing. I want to hear my heart go pitter-patter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LR: <\/strong>Your graduate workshop professor once said, \u201cIf you want to be a good poet, then write poetry. If you want to be a great poet, then translate.\u201d You do a lot of translation work and released last year a cotranslation of Yi Won\u2019s The World\u2019s Lightest Motorcycle<\/a> <\/em>with Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bella. How was the process of translating the book as well as translating with a collaborator versus working by yourself? How has translation work in general strengthened your personal poetic practice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EJK: <\/strong>With Marci, we are part of a sisterhood with Don Mee Choi, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Stine An, and more\u2014along with our poet sisters in South Korea like Kim Hyesoon and Yi Won. So when I\u2019m translating on my own, no matter how I may feel day to day, I cannot ever be alone. And when I meet a translator, I love them right away. A translator knows you so intimately. They can see into your heart. They know how to love you. As a translator, you have to do that with languages. Languages are thorny things, and the way they treat each other sometimes is awful, but there you are, as you were the day before, trying your best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LR: <\/strong>The first chapter of the memoir, which opens with a letter from your mother, ends with an exhortation to be happy. <\/em>This command, woven through many of the letters, sometimes reads like a responsibility or a burden. I ask too because I remember my father, when he wrote me letters while I was in college, also encouraging me to be happy, and I recall being perplexed. Happiness was never a present condition I actively sought out or remember being encouraged to be<\/em>, the latter of which I feel like is a particularly Asian dilemma. Happiness is a prospect to be attained in the future by working hard rather than being happy now. This encouragement to be happy might feel particularly ironic for Asian American children pursuing vocations in the arts and letters (given many parents\u2019 traditional attitudes towards these careers). Do you have any advice for young Asian American artists who may be grappling with parents\u2019 sometimes contradictory expectations? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EJK: <\/strong>Let\u2019s set the table with more possibilities: They ask me to be happy, so I don\u2019t want to be happy, not because it\u2019s what I want but because I know it\u2019s what they want, and I want what they don\u2019t want, or, I can be happy only if things or people are different from what and who they are, and until then, I don\u2019t want to consider being happy, or, I know I can be happy because I understand what it looks like when I\u2019m not but it means they are right and I can\u2019t be happy and wrong, or, I would rather be against someone who is outside the power of my happiness because it helps me separate myself, or, I want them to know they cannot make me happy, though it may be true I\u2019ve given them power over me, or, when I focus on words like happiness<\/em> and family<\/em>, I can pick apart their meanings and put myself into them to see what I can or cannot fit, then decide from that, and so on, with new combinations and other possibilities. Nothing is wrong, these things are on the table, and looking at each one, and each one together, you can go beyond them. In the end, what others say for themselves or for you is outside of how you choose your relationship to yourself and the world. The outside can be a warden for the inside, and everything can crumble and [can] do so easily. But if you can go inside of yourself, the outside will catch up. Tell your heart to open and let go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LR: <\/strong>For your PhD in English literature, you are specializing in Han studies and trauma. What, specifically, are you researching? Do you find that your academic research overlaps with your creative work? Where do you see the similarities between scholarship and creative work in your own personal experience? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EJK: <\/strong>If you look up my poem \u201cAmerican Han\u201d<\/a> in Poetry <\/em>magazine, you\u2019ve read my dissertation. My advisor said this and we both laughed. I\u2019m fifty pages into my dissertation, but it\u2019s as if \u201cAmerican Han\u201d didn\u2019t end. I set the table\u2014you can set anything on the table, but nothing can be taken off. So someone says to me, \u201cYou\u2019re not Korean, you can\u2019t feel han,\u201d and for some reason, it excites me. I say then, \u201cPlease tell me more. Tell me about yourself. Tell me what han means to you.\u201d They say, \u201cThere is original han. Original han is for original Koreans who live in Korea.\u201d And I say, \u201cI am listening because I know we can feel better about han together. Will you listen?\u201d There is great darkness with han, yes, but there is also great relief. My research, like my work, means I don\u2019t look away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LR: <\/strong>Lantern Review<\/em>\u2019s theme for the season is Asian American Appetites. What\u2019s something that you\u2019re hungry for in the future of Asian American letters? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

EJK: <\/strong>[When I am] judging [contests], and I try not to unless I would be especially helpful because it\u2019s another one of those tricky things, but I often read something right out of a pile and get stopped in the middle of it. I\u2019ve read remarkable things by upcoming writers. Things so remarkable I sit up straight and say, \u201cIf only the world knew what incredible writers are coming for them. The years and lives it took for these writers to reach us. What things are being written and spoken so that our thoughts and feelings are no longer just our own, and we can be united again in our humanity.\u201d That goes for fiction, nonfiction, memoirs, plays, graphic novels, translations, poems, scripts, young adult, letters, and more. I\u2019m hungry for it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E. J. Koh<\/a><\/em><\/strong> is the author of the memoir <\/em>The Magical Language of Others (Tin House Books, 2020), Washington State Book Award winner, Pacific Northwest Book Award winner, Association of Asian American Studies Book Award winner, and PEN Open Book Award longlist. Koh is the author of the poetry collection <\/em>A Lesser Love (Louisiana State U Press, 2017). Her debut novel, <\/em>The Liberators, is forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2023.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ALSO RECOMMENDED:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Cover<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Thrown in the Throat <\/em>by Benjamin Garcia (Milkweed Editions, 2020)<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please consider supporting a small press or independent bookstore with your purchase.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an Asian American\u2013focused publication, Lantern Review<\/em> stands for diversity within the literary world. In solidarity with other communities of color and in an effort to connect our readers with a wider range of voices, we recommend a different collection by a non-Asian-American-identified BIPOC poet in each blog post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This summer, I had the privilege of speaking with E. J. Koh about her memoir, The Magical Language of Others, (Tin House, 2020) as well as her background in poetry and translation. Koh is also the author of poetry collection A Lesser Love, (LSU Press, 2017) and the novel The Liberators, forthcoming in 2023. Her poem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[7],"tags":[1497,1495,1496,1498],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9058"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9058"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9058\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9065,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9058\/revisions\/9065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}