Jaeyun Yoo : part five

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

Sharon Olds, Joy Harjo, Ocean Vuong, Yun Dong-Ju. 

Jaeyun Yoo : part four

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

Precision. As poetry is often about compression rather than expansion, a poet’s job is to figure out the best way to capture a message or an image with limited words. Having said that, I am interested in writing that is not bound by literary rules and enjoy the cross-pollination and genre-bending between different forms.

Jaeyun Yoo : 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? 

Once I write the first draft, I let it rest for at least a few days before looking at it again. I bring my draft to workshop groups for their thoughtful input. Afterwards, I edit the poem again. This may take a few days or years! Depending on the poem, I may submit it to literary magazines or add it to my manuscript in development. Poetry is a paced process for me.

I recently completed The Writer’s Studio, which is a creative writing certificate program at Simon Fraser University. My classmates and I still meet monthly for workshopping which I find very enriching. I am also part of a collective of emerging poets called Harbour Centre 5 (https://harbourcentre5.wixsite.com/poetry). We met through a continuing education poetry course at Simon Fraser University and have been workshopping together for several years. We recently produced a collaborative chapbook called Brine. The sense of community has been so valuable in my development as a writer.  

Jaeyun Yoo : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

A couple of years ago, I asked one of my poetry mentors this same question. She chuckled and told me about how she recently dug up the Microsoft Word file of a poem that was published many years ago and started editing the poem again, because she “felt like it.” That was incredibly liberating for me. My relationship with poems became much more fluid once I understood that a poem may never be finished and instead, I could aspire for the poem to be good enough. 

Jaeyun Yoo : part one

Jaeyun Yoo is a Korean-Canadian poet and psychiatrist living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, also known as Vancouver. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and has appeared in Canthius, The /tƐmz/ Review, Prairie Fire, Grain, CV2, EVENT and others. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. She is a member of Harbour Centre 5, a collective of emerging poets. Their collaborative chapbook, Brine, was published in 2022. @jaeyunwrites on Twitter.

How did you first engage with poetry?

When I was in elementary school in South Korea, we were required to keep a diary which was reviewed regularly by the teacher. I used to procrastinate until the day before the deadline. I remember my mom looking stern but slightly amused at my scramble to fill the pages, then suggesting: Why don’t you write a poem for a diary entry? It would be shorter but still meaningful. 

So I first engaged with poetry as a “shortcut.” It quickly became fun and special to me. As I became more intentional about the elements of poetry, it often took longer than writing narratives!