The Lightning Room with Chen Chen

–Interview by Diana Clarke

I met Chen Chen this spring at a writing retreat in Amherst, MA, and was thrilled to find his name and poems in the August issue of [PANK]. Chen was kind enough to speak with me about making and reading poetry that’s “queer and hairy and kinda smelly. “

1. Within the first stanza of “for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me” I found myself thinking of Walt Whitman, that most American of poets. I mean, first you have the opener borrowed from the Pledge of Allegiance, and then you move, like Walt in “I Hear America Singing,” into a litany of parallels. However Whitman’s love for America is generous and earnest–your pledge is a great deal more bitter, or at least skeptical–towards American tropes, towards the lover…

Well, I will say this: I love Whitman and sometimes wish I had his totally embracing exuberance, but I think you’re right in your reading of my poem–it’s more skeptical. It’s studied up a bit on postmodernism and poststructuralism, and it’s feeling less certain about projects (like nation-building or committed relationships) that seek to consolidate knowledge, close off possibility. The poem expresses a desire to align or adhere to something, but has a lot of trouble actually doing that–so the “pledge” is a searching for and an exploring, rather than a true avowal. 

2. I imagine you wrote “i pledge allegiance to the always/partial, the always translated, the always never/of knowing” fully aware of your attempt to render that idea tangible, recognizable, with this poem. How does the knowledge that complete understanding is impossible sit with you when you sit to write? Or, better: what do you try, by writing, to do?

I love being surprised when I write. Usually I start with a scrap of language, something musical and/or imagistic that feels alive and urgent for some crackpot reason. Then I follow that initial burst of energy, hoping to discover other bursts. Or squeaks, at least. Sometimes I’m pretty purposeful in trying to disrupt/interrupt the poem–I’ll throw in elements that I’m not sure fit together, and that becomes the challenge. In the case of this poem, I had the repetition of “i pledge” stuck in my head, some imagistic fragments involving winter in Syracuse, and an ending from another poem that didn’t seem to work in that poem, so I transplanted it into this one. Often what’s most alive is a mutant form I could not have predicted or planned for. I want my poems to be like Magneto from the X-Men, played by Michael Fassbender.

3. I loved how you moved from metaphorical translation to the literal linguistic shift (often) demanded by international travel, and the loss of intimate language and jokes between estranged lovers (“& you tell me you’ve left for another country”). As a poet, how do you relate to language on an everyday level, the small translations between selves, between screen and landscape, etc.?

Poetry seems to me its own kind of language, which is a hodgepodge demon-tongue of everything I’ve ever read, heard, imagined. I’m always learning how to speak this weird language, more weirdly. Poetry is not my native tongue, and I like it that way. It’s made up of an English that cannot help but be a symbol/tool of the colonizer. But at the same time, a symbol/tool of the maker and dreamer and walker. I like never completely understanding poetry, as a reader or writer. I like believing that there’s always more to imagine. I like not mastering it (= taming it, colonizing it). The awkwardness of the amateur (lover) is more seductive to me. More true. Poetry that seems overly polished (professional) is a turn off. I like it queer and hairy and kinda smelly.

4. In “poem,/love,” the voice is intimate, direct. The speaker beseeches (demands? Why do I assume a lack of power?) that the unseen, unnamed lover(/audience) “undo me.” When you write–or when you wrote this poem–how do you relate to audience? Do you write with a reader in mind?

Re: audience–mostly, hopefully, everyone. For this poem, I guess there is a beloved being addressed. So the reader could be in the position of eavesdropping. Or the reader could put him/her/their self in the position of the beloved. It’s open. Sometimes it helps, while writing, to imagine a specific person as reader/receiver. Like, Virginia Woolf or Tom Petty.

5. Both of these poems are very physical. Yet in “poem,/love” the speaker asks to lose consciousness, rather than to grapple with the political and metaphysical implications of the preceding poem: “murk me blue me/knock me out out//of me my/tight &/goodly just sweetly/behead me.” When is a poem a way to focus and sharpen consciousness? When is it a way to escape?

Oh I love it when a poem seeks to entertain. To have fun. And that’s both a mental and physical thing. But sometimes the physical needs to take over. I was thinking about how joy from a poem (or any experience) can feel like a punch that you didn’t know you needed. A punch of necessary grapefruit and bacon and shower sex.

6. What or who do you read when you get fed up?

Lately, Sarah Gambito. Her second book, Delivered–mhmm. Also, Aracelis Girmay. Always. I’m super excited for Claudia Rankine’s new book, Citizen. The backs of most cereal boxes are quite good, too. I’d like to get good enough to write on the back of cereal boxes. They have very important information for your heart.