Sunny Vuong : part five

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

The ingenious Gabriella R. Tallmadge, my mentor from Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship, explained once that a poem operates within its own logic: its own universe, almost. A vacuum where every rule went, so long as no contradictions were made.

Which isn’t to say that works in other genres cannot also operate just as surreally within their own atmospheres—just that I find, personally, the most freedom within a poem. Crafting each poem as a new world comes quicker and more practiced to me than doing so would in writing in another form.

Sunny Vuong : part four

What are you working on?

Over the course of the summer, I participated in a workshop, led by the brilliant Angie Sijun Lou, that focused on the story in fragments. While I do have a fiction piece born from that workshop currently in the process of seeing light, I’ve applied what I learned from the workshop to my poetry specifically.

Playing with interlinked prose fragments, and experimental, hybrid poetry, in short. I’ve started to explore fragmented prose poetry, and I would attribute my current works-in-progress’ experimental nature to having gained inspiration from works such as Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water and Diana Khoi Nguyen’s “An Empty House is a Debt.”

Sunny Vuong : part three

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

I would describe my writing style as tending to fall more on the conversational side. Finding a balance between making sure that particular lines work sonically, have a proper internal rhythm, and serve to carry the momentum of the piece can sometimes be a challenge. 

Sunny Vuong : part two

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

I used to view poetry as a rest stop, of sorts—a liminal space with endless potential for catharsis and soothing stagnancy. A way to make something alive that didn’t have to be anything other than what I needed it to; there couldn’t be any harm found in exploring the self in an already familiar terrain of stanzas.

My relationship with poetry has changed since then, more so reflective of viewing it as a vehicle: something that aids in exploration beyond the self. A means of discovery and experimentation, rather than just reimagining of the familiar. Something that could be anything—perhaps even more than what I needed it to be.

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.