Sunny Vuong : part one

Sunny Vuong is the founder and editor-in-chief of Interstellar Literary Review, and a poetry mentee of the 2021 Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship program. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Diode, Strange Horizons, and Kissing Dynamite, among others. Find her on Twitter @sunnyvwrites.

How do you know when a poem is finished?

If poetry is the act of making something alive, then a finished product reflects this: does every question posed point to something else? Is the reader surrounded by the poem’s truth, or are they made to sit with it? How could an audience recontextualize themselves within the poem’s logic? How does the poem interact with itself as a body, a whole, made of parts? A final draft, to me, is dynamic—it breathes in every way that it can.

As for the technical process of getting there—I fine tune the symbols I use, make sure the poem’s form is supplementary to its content, and take recordings of myself doing a reading to make sure that each line’s rhythm is natural and that every line break serves a purpose.