Chuqiao Yang : part five

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

I always go back and read The City in Which I Loved You by Li-Young Lee, Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” by Frank O’Hara, Natalie Diaz’s collection When My Brother Was an Aztec, and anything I can get my hands on by Ocean Vuong.

Chuqiao Yang : part four

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I think it is so hard to pare down an image, an experience, a thought, or anything, down to its most simple form. Sculpting away the excess. To write about things everyone has at one point written about and to do it in a way that honours and challenges your own unique voice.

Chuqiao Yang : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I work with a friend of mine quite closely. We normally edit and try to exchange five pages of work a week. Sometimes I show poems to my friends, but only after I think they are no longer in rough shape.

Chuqiao Yang : part two

What are you working on?

I am working on a manuscript of poems and a novel.

Chuqiao Yang : part one

Chuqiao Yang received her Juris Doctor from the University of Windsor. Her writing has appeared in The Unpublished City, 30 under 30: an anthology of Canadian millennial poets, The Puritan, Ricepaper, Arc, Prism, Filling Station, Grain, CV2, Room, and on CBC. In 2011, she was the recipient of two Western Magazine Awards for a non-fiction piece, Beijing Notes. In 2015, she was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her chapbook, Reunions in the Year of the Sheep, published by Baseline Press, won the 2018 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Follow her on Twitter @chuqiaoyang.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I am not sure, but I think I know when a poem is unfinished and I know when I am done with the poem.

I know a poem is unfinished when it reads poorly, or if I am outright embarrassed by it.

I know when I am done with a poem when I able to separate my experience and emotions from the poem. It’s at that point that I know I am done with the poem, and that it may be on its way to becoming something else to someone else. In that respect, I’ve freed myself from the obsession, or experience that got me stuck in the mindset behind the poem. And that means I’ve recovered, processed, or healed, mostly, from whatever inspired me to write in the first place. So maybe the poem isn’t done but by that point, I am done with it, until, of course, the cycle repeats itself and I revisit it a decade later.