Rebecca Mutsumi Wong: You have previously mentioned that you get particular poetic obsessions. What have been some of your past obsessions? Do you see obsession as related to the title of your book, or shaping your poetry: obsession as a performance of repeating, reenacting, constantly going back to (or returning to) one thing? What does obsession evoke for you?

 

Emily Lee Luan: I was obsessed with the idea of obsession when I first started writing the book, obsessed with the idea that we all write the same poem over and over and over again. That a poet like Petrarch, in his obsession with the idea of Laura, could write a single cycle of 377 poems toward a new definition of poetry, creation, God.

 

I believe in belligerent repetition, ie. if you have a compulsion to repeat something in your writing—an idea, color, image, memory, etc.—you have to let yourself repeat it, even aggressively, relentlessly so, either to shake yourself loose of it or to understand it. We are taught not to repeat, that it’s embarrassing, regressive. Sorry if I’ve already told you this. I say that all the time. I understand where the negativity around repetition comes from—harm is often habituated, and we are told that to progress is to divert from patterns of behavior. But shame in repeating can also, ironically, lead to looking away. If 回 / Return was an exercise in anything, it was an exercise in not looking away. To repeat as a means to a way out or back. That to go back or circle around is also its own kind of progress. 

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RMW: Your poems seem to think about the return to grief and loss, but also to the everyday and banal. Maybe that’s what grief is—a low-grade, repeated sadness that becomes entangled with the ordinary. I am thinking here of your poem, “Search,” which talks about google searching (a mundane, everyday thing) but the thing you are searching is “my sadness.” I’m also thinking of lines like “My sadness is my refrigerator / is a sink!” You have talked about David Eng and Shinhee Han’s work on Asian American racialization and loss. This poem very much feels like it is thinking about that intersection, and specifically Eng’s and Han’s interest in the “hidden histories of everyday, mundane, and quotidian violence against Asian Americans.” How do you see this entanglement—of Asian American racialization, grief/sadness/loss, and the everyday? 

 

Emily Lee Luan: Thank you for this question, and these connections! 

 

I’ve always understood the mundane as a way to anchor sadness. When we are sad, we see every object as sad. Not just barren trees or the ocean at night, but tea kettles, a bowl of noodles, sneakers. 

 

One way to think about this tendency is in terms of projection—emotion as a filter that colors reality. But I experience the need to name the mundane more so as a displacement; grief, for example, displaced onto objects. Can the object hold my feeling? This feels related to the way Eng and Han (and Anne Anlin Cheng too) describe the movement from mourning to melancholy in the children of immigrants—the mother’s loss of the homeland becomes disassociated and unlocatable within her child.

 

If you’ve internalized the idea of or endured that “quotidian violence,” then you become a student of observation. You have to name the ways, small and large, that you might have had that violence enacted upon you—for a time, I needed to scale my sadness in order for it to feel “real.” By recording what you see, you might begin to see the feeling—discomfort, rage, slighted—as tangible, and therefore movable, changeable. In other words, it becomes object. For a time, I felt my sadness was absolutely unexceptional and unreal. The repetition of the word “sadness” in “Search” and in the rest of the book was also an attempt to make the word-object of the feeling mundane, merely a shape on the page.
 

RMW: That same poem, “Search,” ends with the repetition of the word ugly arranged in a kind of a four-by-four grid—how do ugliness and beauty come up in your poetry? Your use of a classical Chinese poetic form, the reversible poem, seems to contest dominant understandings of what constitutes the beautiful, pushing us to think outside of Western aesthetics. Beauty and ugliness, as well as everyday senses and feelings, come up again in “TargetTM Haibun.” Thinking about the line, “Somehow, after all this time, I still believe in an objective kind of beauty,” makes me wonder, can we ever fully let go of white, Western, constructions of beauty? How does the critique of Western aesthetics, present in your poetry’s forms, map onto your themes and images of sadness and depression, or the feeling of being something that “doesn’t fit / doesn’t fit / doesn’t fit”?

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Emily Lee Luan: I’m really interested in the connection you’re making, about how the internalization of whiteness as beauty mirrors our acceptance of certain formal aesthetics—in this case, the lineage of the English-language poem. What this is conjuring for me, today, is the idea of labor, ie. the “work” of undoing, even revolting against, whiteness and the structures it creates. How, as in any kind of emotional work or progression, the feeling of regression can appear, surprising us, in the most mundane of moments, like seeing a blond woman in a Target and feeling an old, childhood, almost ancient kind of envy and self-hatred. Maybe that’s why I had the impulse to write that poem as a haibun. For me, the tension in that form is between the feeling of progression and movement forward, and how the haiku at the end refuses that progress—it pulls us back, iterates, revises, distills the journey we’ve been on in the text. I’m thinking here of Sianne Ngai’s “ugly feelings,” and how those affects that whiteness has deemed unproductive (in this case, regression, envy, self-hatred) might actually offer pathways out of oppressive structures.

 

Yes, I think all poems are beautiful. But the poems I find most beautiful are ones where the poem enacts a labor—of enacting emotion through form, or of resisting the purity of clean meaning-making. That’s why I’m interested most in poets who write within the dominant mode of the English-language poem in order to undo its terms—of conclusiveness, problem-solving, a singular “I.” What work can the poem do to move closer to the fear and violence that the English-language has enacted, to not perpetuate that violence but to carve its own formal beauty within it? 

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RMW: I am interested in your statement in a previous interview, that your “linguistic project in the collection is to make people look at the Chinese character on the page, rather than reading past it, or allowing the silence of non-recognition to shadow its appearance.” This seems particularly relevant to a poem like 《哭》, since it thinks not only about the sound of the character (ku), which can alternately mean a hole, bitterness, or the act of crying, but also focuses instead on its image. To say that the surface image is enough seems to make the Chinese character accessible to those who do not read the language—anyone can discern meaning from it—but there is still also a withholding, a stubborn refusal to translate into English. What is the function of this withholding? I am interested in what emerges out of this acceptance that, as readers, we may not be able to glean every possible meaning—how that changes the way we read across languages and cultures, and what it says about the impossibility of full and complete understanding, or true empathy.
 

Emily Lee Luan: There is something so sad to me about the character《哭》。《哭》gazes at a reader with two eyes and a single tear. The looking that 《哭》does and the feeling of receiving its gaze isn’t within the language world. So how might we translate that experience within language, without losing the experience itself? 

 

Withholding allows for a pulling back of impulse—in this case, the impulse to physically sound the character—and for another impulse to rush in, like a delayed form of surprise. It can also create a slowing effect.

 

I love what you’re saying about empathy, because withholding can sometimes be seen passive at best and at its worst vindictive or spiteful. We resist it because we feel like we’re not “getting” something that we perhaps “deserve”—impulses which, of course are tied to a societal, hierarchal need to gain or to move up.

 

If we accept that sadness can be generative, productive, then withholding meaning or aural translatability might proliferate different kinds of meaning, more types of meaning rather than less, which in turn creates more points of communication and understanding.
 

RMW: Many of your poems such as “In That Year I Read Ovid,” “I curse the day,” and “Bitterness is the Chinese Root of Emotional Hurt” create and use white space, which to me feels like absence, a pause, a way of forcing the reader to slow down and a way of emphasizing each word. It gestures at the passage of time and also acts like the gutter between comic panels, allowing one to read multidirectionally. When I look at these poems, it’s not clear that they should be read solely left to right, top to bottom. Do you see this intersecting with the classical form of the Chinese reversible poem or how Chinese poems are generally read? What does freeing us from this one direction of reading do to the poem? How does it impact what is being communicated? 
 

Emily Lee Luan: Oh, I haven’t thought of that before: a poem as a comic, or a comic as a reversible poem. 

 

I’m very much of the belief that white space is as much a part of the poem as the text itself, and in my poems—especially the reversible poems and the poems that adhere to certain shapes or visual forms—I like to see how that white space can provide a hinge or momentum back into the text. 

 

Chinese reversible poems or “returning texts” are typically read from the beginning to the end and then back up again, but there are also poems where characters are laid out in a circle and you can read clockwise and counter-clockwise from any point in the circle. In the case of Su Hui’s famous reversible, you can read it multi-directionally (left, right, up, down), and it forms various other poems within quadrants, on diagonals, by color, and so on. 

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I’ll mention just two things I learned in the process of translating these forms into English. First, to your point, the way we experience time changes. The Chinese reversible is endless, in that it never ends, in that you get to the “end” of the poem and you must immediately turn around and travel back to the “beginning” of the poem, and then back. And not to mention that Chinese has no verb conjugation, so we experience a continuous present that is mingled interchangeably with the past. 

 

Secondly, a Chinese reversible poem offers the question of what the “center” of the poem is, rather than what the beginning and endpoint is. If we can read the poem forever, backward and then forward, where is its middle? What is its rising action? Of course, many poets are interested in this, and outside of the Chinese-language tradition (just off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Anthony Cody, Marwa Helal, Douglas Kearney, Keith Wilson). Earlier, I spoke about the need to disrupt the dominant mode of the English-language poem. To physically de-center a poem, as well as the time it adheres to, ruptures the expectation of “western” narrative. It might posit that the poem can’t solve anything, in the way that the sonnet supposes that it can. It might say that anti-progress toward a non-destination is progress, too. It might allow those ugly feelings to do their work, and on their own terms.

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