Angelo Mao : part five

How did you first engage with poetry?

Quite late, for English-language poetry. I learned Chinese before I learned English, and my parents had me memorize some Chinese poems early on. I think the rhythms of those Tang poems occupy a very deep stratum in my subconscious. We didn’t study any lyric poetry in high school. I did begin writing then, but it was fanfiction. I wrote three novel length fanfiction pieces by the time I was midway through undergraduate. My engagement with poetry at that point involved trawling it for beautiful lines, out of which I’d fashion evocative chapter titles. I also composed music for fun, and had written all sorts of things—fugues, an opera—before I seriously engaged with poetry. And I only did so because I found it difficult to transition from fanfiction to fiction. Writing fanfiction was easy, because I could make up things about preexisting characters; “real” fiction was hard. I felt that I had to use myself as a resource, and I wasn’t ready to do that.

So I looked into poetry as an unexplored alternative. I wouldn’t have gotten very far, though, if I hadn’t discovered Helen Vendler’s criticism. I could sense and savor the music in poetry, but Vendler helped me see that the words, forms, and artistic choices weren’t there just to “sound good,” but harbored huge possibilities of expression. (It is the same thing with operatic music: you can treat an embellishment as just that, or as an opportunity for conveying an emotion or mood.)