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–Interview by Diana Clarke
Do you long to believe in Whitman’s transcendent vision but criticize his earnestness? November poet Yanyi Luo suggests laughter; it’s “the sound of power unhinging.”
1. “Song of My Selfie” just slayed me with wonder and paradox. How you honor and also skewer Walt Whitman, make poetry out of shoutycaps while satirizing the hyperbolic (performed) enthusiasm that passes for joy on the internet. The search for a “NEW TRANSCENDENTALISM” feels just as urgent as when Walt was writing, and “a BETTER VERSION OF MYSELF” is still such a seductive fantasy. The American dream is so damn persistent. Do you think the internet changed it?
I think that internet technology has given us with the capability for rapid networked communities. This is most significant for those who have been buried, excluded, or misrepresented systemically and historically. We know that the American dream comes with exceptions, but now it is easier—not easy—to begin dialogues with these communities. Those conversations are making their way visibly into mainstream culture. The outlook isn’t wholly optimistic: the internet is a technology, not a leveling field, and the startup and blogger world reflect familiar demographics of overwhelming maleness and whiteness. Whatever change may come from dialogue is still to be seen. Yet, the internet provides the linguistic and satirical context that allows “Song of My Selfie” to exist. I criticize Whitman’s earnestness, but I also want to believe in it, and I sincerely long for a transcendental being that is self-loving but radical, not indiscriminately containing multitudes but constantly looking to enable them and change with them.
2. Your poems leap between perspectives—second person in “The Alphabet of Tasty” and “[],” first person in “Song of My Selfie,” and a kind of transcending third-person prophetical in “The Ruse of the Gulls” and “Optimism While in Line at Starbucks.” It was very striking to me, made me feel like I was on the internet (okay, I was reading your poems on the internet) or in a crowd. Does that resonate for you? So often I think readers are tempted to conflate narrative voice and the voice of the poet, but your poems tempted in the opposite direction. Being large, containing multitudes–was that a conscious choice?
Yes. I try to write poetry of imaginative witness—work that troubles the binary line between the traditionally unmarked, invisible, and panoptic gaze and the gaze marked as confessional, subjective, and limited. I consider myself an identity politics poet, and I do so because others will mark my work as the latter gaze; because my Chinese name is part of the text of my poems. I say “imaginative” because I’m fascinated by mythologies and the epistemological implications of metaphor. I can set down the tone and feelings and images, but I hand over final meaning to my reader’s situated interpretation. This is not to say that the meaning of my poetry is external to it; rather, it is I who must be able to see more and further to direct the connotations and narratives around my words and I who must give room for those who will come to them and see new possibilities.
3. Your interest in the long poem, filled with wordplay, bold sexuality, and digital consciousness, reminded me in certain ways of Patricia Lockwood, who is of course the internet poet of the moment. Do you think that’s a fair comparison? Why do the internet and poetry and sex speak so well to one another?
Sarah Mesle wrote an analysis in the LA Review of Books on Mallory Ortberg’s new book which details this satirical form of feminist internet critique—I’ll call it feminist absurdism—that Patricia Lockwood seems to do. I definitely borrow from this technique. I assume that you refer particularly to Lockwood’s sext tweets series but also her larger project of mapping and reappropriating the outrageous demands of male control and desire around the feminine and female-bodied. I can see Lockwood online, easily finding everyday websites and networks that codify and legitimize those demands. But if they exist on the internet, they are texts, and we poets can take them back. We can arrange them for scrutiny with unfamiliar contexts; we can hijack their diction, their rhythms, their unnamed speakers, and we can do this with absurdity. Laughter can be the sound of power unhinging.
4. I loved how in “Optimism While in Line at Starbucks,” you locate the reader in the title, but the poem itself, a rumination on the robotic erotic techology of the future, could take place anywhere. Of course, a Starbucks could also be anywhere, just about. How do we make room for specificity, aberration, location amidst globalization?
I wasn’t at Starbucks when I wrote that poem, but I wanted to convey the fear around assembly-line consumerism, fueled by real desire and addiction, that we are no longer in control of what we want. When every technology seems to be in service of something that seeks to dominate you, it’s tempting to assume that that’s all technology does. Yet, I also see language as a technology. It’s one that can formally render any subjectivity, location, or difference, but you must build your meanings in the margins of the regularly scheduled programming. Whether or not change is possible in a particular historical moment shouldn’t disrupt that making. Keep it new and keep it subversive.
5. The three poems from “Towards a Liberation of Radical Sugar” all deal, quite differently, with desire and eros. I read “sugar” as sexual pleasure. How do you envision that liberation off the page? What does your larger poetic project look like?
It might be more useful to answer those questions backwards. With “Towards a Liberation of Radical Sugar,” sugar can be any desire humming out of line, with liberation being an enabled state of dynamic being. You are able to express who and what you are; to act for what you desire; to be free and able to change yourself at will. Sexual pleasure is definitely one of them, and is one of the desires I bring to the poems myself. The sugar should become what you need it to be, and “Towards a Liberation of Radical Sugar” should stir and speak for that something that has been buried for you. My other, more explicit project is that I want to create a place that I don’t float or disappear from; that these poems make a “where” that is queer and feminine and marginal, and that belonging to this world will continue to be true, defiantly and magically.
6. I’m going to out myself as your friend here. I know that you often write poems on your phone, or compose them in your head while walking or riding the subway, and I–as a very slow, laborious prose writer–admire and envy (and idealize) that casual interaction with writing, the sense of ease and fun. Can you talk some about what the process of writing a poem is like for you?
The majority of my poems start as emotions I’m having or phrases and lines that associatively set something off in me linguistically. Those are the poems that come in rough spurts—I write them in one or two moments—before they’re edited down. The first lines of “Song of My Selfie” are from a morning text to my friend Will. That is not always the case, though. I just finished a poem for which I’d gone through seven or eight drafts, and recently I’ve been doing ekphrastic poems in a style that requires more precision than I’m used to. There is order to the madness, though. I wake up early and try to get at least an hour of writing in before heading to work. Drafts come from my phone or a notebook and, when I think I’ve finished a version, I copy the poem and edit or rewrite more versions until it feels done. Final drafts make it into a master folder on my computer and get printed for a pile on my morning writing desk. There’s something grounding about the quiet of that morning ritual. It is good to have a way to center myself.