Spilled Interviews: Chen Chen
Dare Williams and Chen Chen discuss play, mango smoothies, and how to listen to what a poem needs.
Dare Williams: In your craft chap for Sundress Press, You MUST use the Word Smoothie: A Craft Essay in 50 Writing Prompts, I love how you encourage a sense of play in the writing process. It was a shift from my go-to’s regarding the subject matter I ordinarily deal with. Do you have any further thoughts about bringing a sense of play to the page?
Chen Chen: Thank you for reading that craft chap! I’ve been really moved by how people respond to that little guy full of absurd ideas and directions. I’m glad it’s useful, maybe not always in a direct or practical way, but in a creatively expansive way (I hope). Further ways to bring play to the page… I hate to be like, oh exercise, but I do think some physical movement can help, whether that’s taking a walk or dancing or moving your hands in a different way or doing something else. Being in the body, basically. Understanding what your body is and needs and is drawn to. That understanding can open you up, make you more receptive to surprise, which is the core of play. Actually I don’t know if you need to move. Sitting in a very present way can do the same thing. I’m remembering how I suggest going to the Korean spa in the craft chap. Sitting and soaking. So much of writing, after all, is about how you pay attention—to language, to the world, to yourself. Attending more so than thinking! Attending life. And I think that all starts with listening to your physical, sensory, and sensual being.
DW: Speaking of smoothies, what would the Chen Chen smoothie be like?
CC: It would definitely feature mango. Mango would be the star (pop star). Plus the crisp, melancholy taste of a mid-autumn day (co-pop star). Summer and fall in one beverage—that’s the ideal.
DW: One of the qualities I love about your work is the turns and directions regarding thinking. I’m going one way, then we are going this other way, the container encapsulating the happy and the sad. Is that something that happens at the outset of drafting or more in revision?
CC: It happens pretty organically at every stage of working on a poem. In revision I might find that the poem needs more swerving, or less. Sometimes a poem really benefits from a tighter focus and fewer elements being juggled. I tend to realize this when it becomes clear that I’m using humor and being super playful but it’s not getting me closer to a vital truth; in this case, I’m using those things to be clever or to actually avoid getting to the truth. So, I need to get real and pare things back and let it all quiet down. But plenty of poems need the opposite—a looser or more associative structure and more space for all the elements to interact; maybe they just need more time to get to know one another.
I’m a big believer in the poem telling me what it needs, which usually takes a longer stretch of time (months or even years). Ultimately, I want each poem to feel alive, which means it needs some complexity of emotion. Even if the poem is like, 90% joyful, something needs to happen, maybe in the sound of the words, maybe underneath the words, that is subverting or talking back to the primary emotion.
DW: I’ve been thinking a lot about the unheard of or unknown queer/POC writers that aren’t talked about as much due to many reasons, loss, erasure, not being published in their time/or given a certain amount of space, not being taught. Are there figures you keep close that you wished were discussed/read/taught more?
CC: Justin Chin, for sure. He died in 2015. I’ve been revisiting and writing about his incredibly funny and incredibly hot poem, “Lick My Butt.” You can also hear me read this poem, alongside a poem of mine that imagines a conversation between Chin and me (we never got to meet, which makes me very sad) here, as part of Deerfield Library’s Queer Poem-a-Day project. Many thanks to curators Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno.
Robert Hayden comes to mind, too. His poem “Those Winter Sundays” is famous and his work in general has received more attention recently, but still—I would love for everybody to read Hayden’s Collected Poems. So much range in his work—love poems, family poems, spiritual poems, nature poems, political poems of various kinds. He does the image-driven poem as well as he does the narrative poem, which I think is rare. And his long poems are great models for how to do just that, how to sustain a poem for page after page. I’ve been wanting to teach a seminar or something focused on Hayden’s work. And Eduardo C. Corral has a gorgeous poem addressed to him, “To Robert Hayden.”