What are you working on?
I tend to work on one long project and many small poems simultaneously. Currently I am working on a long book of poetry entitled 'The Screaming Paper' it is a highly exploratory work which is proving challenging but enlightening.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Here’s one: There are so many kinds of silence available to poets that are unavailable to writers or prose or to painters or sculptors or even musicians. We have the silence of the line break, of the stanza break. The silence of white space. Of the punctuated caesura and the unpunctuated caesura. We have the vast silence that comes at the end of the poem. These silences are so versatile and, well deployed (well arranged) contain within them a kind of music, patterns of silence. Sometimes these silences suggest the dramatic pauses of a speaker who falters, looks for the right word, creates suspense or tension. Sometimes they are the silences of a mind at work on a problem—moments where the mind rests in unarticulated thought before thought arrives at articulation and the words begin again. I am increasingly fascinated by qualities of silence, the white page.
How important is music to your poetry?
Very. For me it’s one of the three most important impersonal elements in my poems—the other two being metaphor and the line. Other poets I know are often obsessed with the look of their poems on a page; I’m far more concerned with how my poems sound. There’s a danger in relying on sound too much, of course. Occasionally I’ve been accused by a mentor or an editor of overemphasizing the music of a poem, to the point of facileness or opacity, but that’s a risk I’m always ready to take. Also, it’s not as if verbal music in poems only exists as a kind of sonic ornament (I’m not trying to rewrite “Jabberwocky”); as A.E. Stallings and others have pointed out, rhyme creates its own intelligence akin to that of metaphor, in that the pairing of rhymes can create connections that the poet would not have arrived at in any other way.
How did you first engage with poetry?
My mom bought me Sharon Creech’s Heartbeat when I was about ten. Up until then I was a voracious reader but mostly read fiction novels, and it was then that I discovered you could write stories in verse, that poetry didn’t have to rhyme, that repetition could make for rhythm, and that you could in fact tell a story using a series of poems that interrelate. It paved the way for me to later learn that poetry does not necessarily need to be written in verse – and I did a lot of prose poetry writing for a while, particularly as an undergraduate. That book marked a turning point; from then on, when I said I wanted to be a writer when I grew up, I shifted from picturing a novelist to picturing a poet. Which was really for the best, because my novel drafts from those early days spent four chapters describing characters and scenery and feelings and never did get around to anything resembling a plot.
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry like music is totally free. No one is the authority on it. It’s an absolutely free form. We can invent all the rules for it we want, but someone is going to break those rules and make something beautiful. Poetry is the ultimate edge of creation, the unknown. It’s an adventure. It’s a trip. Its language at play like the rawest elements of reality, becoming in the moment over and over and always new, yet full of everything that went before. It can capture your most fluid thought or dream. It can give you your most fluid thought or dream. It’s a document of an idea and it’s the engine for an idea. It’s the snake biting its own tail. It’s the dark enigma. The minute I say what it is, I’m wrong. That’s what makes it so fun. It’s as old as language itself, and it’s always being born.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
I don’t know. Is anything really “finished?”
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.)
