Ask The Author: Lo Kwa Mei-en

Four Poems + five questions make for nine very special pieces of reading from Lo Kwa Mei-en.

1. What geography do you trust the most?

Trust, for me, is more meaningful as an intentional act rather than a state of grace that can be assumed. I trust the ocean. If I had the choice–and much of the time I do–I would not trust anything. I love an excuse to stay in, where everyday dangers such as automobiles, super-developing technologies, and alienation are also present but where my sense of control is less challenged by the seeming mundanity of those dangers. There is little mundane about the sudden appearance of an undertow, stinging jellyfish, or starved shark in the water. All of those things are in the water, and cannot be controlled.

Engaging with a geography like the ocean taught me trust because there is no way to engage with the ocean if you do not make the conscious choice to trust its basic nature despite having plenty of rational reasons not to. To enter the sea is to embrace both the risk and reward of being a creature entering a whole other ridiculously amazing world. Of course, you could say the same thing about any wilderness. There is a lot of trust that goes into falling asleep in the woods, but there is something about the fact and presence of solid ground that in that case might allow me to (incorrectly) take for granted my place in the world more than I would on the water. Of course, you could say the same thing about people, too.

2. Why is poetry fascinated with myth? 

Because like poetry, myth lives in a weird and exciting place of negotiatable fictionality and meaning-making where whether it’s “true” or not is besides the point? Because a myth has no author and therefore can be appropriated as a received narrative structure in similar ways to how poets can appropriate received verse forms like the sonnet or received rhetorical conventions like anaphora? I don’t know!

3. How are Singapore and Ohio similar?

I know a significant number of people who couldn’t wait to leave Singapore, and found themselves to be drawn back, and I know an equally significant number of people who couldn’t wait to leave Ohio, and found themselves to be drawn back.

4. What would you cross breed? What would you hope would be the final outcome?

5. What might have been lost?

One way I’m looking at it is what one might lose by armoring themselves, by undergoing the transformation of becoming somebody who has, at least once, been armored. But another way is to ask–and prioritize–what can be lost when a person is given reason to need armor in the first place. When is armoring an action and when is it a reaction? When can it be both? Are there different contexts in which framing it as one or the other will be most useful, and if so, for whom? There are armors that are best put back down, and there are armors that cannot be taken off. There are armors that should not be taken off. Armor is like a gun in how its functional purpose is so strongly implied by its form. Regardless of the intent behind picking up either, the basic function shared by both is related to violence and harm.

A weapon can be perceived as protection from future violence, and to armor oneself for protection from future violence is to engage with the idea of violence on some level.