Monica Youn is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award, as well as being named one of the best poetry collections of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have been widely published, including in Poetry, The New Yorker, New Republic, Lana Turner, Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. The daughter of Korean immigrants and a former lawyer, she was raised in Houston, Texas, and now lives in New York.

Cate Lycurgus: I think I’d like to begin with your newest book Blackacre, and how the collection came to be. What is the concept of a “blackacre”? How did the book and title poem take shape?

Monica Youn: “Blackacre” is a placeholder term for a hypothetical piece of real estate just as ‘John Doe’ is a placeholder term for a hypothetical person. In law one encounters the word Blackacre regularly—so much so that in the legal world, Blackacre is kind of an inside joke—law profs name their vacation homes “Blackacre,” the cafeteria at Vanderbilt Law School is called “Blackacre,” the University of Texas Law School has a literary magazine called “Blackacre.” I was at the Civitella residency and knew I wanted to write about infertility, but didn’t know how I was going to approach it when suddenly Blackacre occurred to me, and it was obvious: the equation between women’s bodies and property. With “infertility” we already have a land-based metaphor, considering a woman as fruitful or barren. And an “estate” encompasses both legacy and landscape, like Emerson who referred to his son’s death as the loss of “a beautiful estate.” And so women’s bodies get commodified along those lines, and legal and social controls evolve to preserve the value of that commodity.

CL: It’s always amazing when I find the answer to a creative problem right in my hands, on my desk, at the tip of a friend’s tongue. I wonder though about the danger of a placeholder, or of a hypothetical estate. The non-specificity or abstraction seems like it could do further damage in terms of commodification. In an age obsessed with direct address or appeal, what does this type of screen afford? What lies behind your decision to (often) write without the “I”?

MY: Well, I tried it, I tried sitting down and just writing about my experience as straightforwardly as possible. But I found I had to consciously put aside a certain model—Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda—which just comes right out and says it – exhaustion, insurance, doctors. Her motto in that book is “no poetry, plain,” meaning, enough with poetry, poetry is a kind of falsehood, a beautification. My situation can in no way be compared to hers, to the experiences she was writing about. But her book was still a powerful model I had to come to terms with. And I tried many different takes, tonally—the clinical and the gurlesque, the hyper-formal, the sassy, but nothing worked. Throughout the infertility experience though, I found myself saying Milton’s Sonnet 19 over and over—waiting for the subway or the elevator—ever since a teacher forced me to memorize it in high school I’ve known it, and so at the time the words “spent,” “prevent,” “wide,” “chide,” “denied” kept coming back to me; I began to write from them.

CL: We come to understand the emotional core of many pieces through a third party, be it the Krazy Kat comics in Ignatz, or the urban legend surrounding Twinkies, or the Milton sonnet. In the first portion of Blackacre’s title poem, the lines “one day they showed me a dark moon ringed / with a bright nimbus on a swirling gray screen / they called it my last chance for neverending life / but the next day it was gone…” haunt me, as does the overt subject which we get only via Milton in the a lyric essay/prose poem sequence that follows. It’s like we have to watch the eclipse by not looking at it—not directly—so how does this triangulation work, in your poems?

MY: Certain things keep coming back to you, sometimes it’s useful to look at them, look into them. In Ignatz the potential for poems about desire seemed inexhaustible, and so I wanted to see how far I could go—like a tetherball. How far could I throw the thing and have it come back to center? There’s even a tetherball poem in there. But those were more playful poems, whereas in Blackacre the knowledge that one could not escape a condition, an allotment, meant I had to look at the closed-ended constraint of the bounded field. A field that had already been harvested, that was fallow, but that I was trying to glean. By digging in, seeing what I could find by looking again.

CL: One thing I love so much about your work is the way it draws attention to the histories and multiplicities of words. The genealogies of them, for lack of a better term. In Blackacre the sonnet’s end words continue to mean anew, resonances piling and growing (not unlike a rapidly growing embryo) until we see something we had not previously recognized. You do this expertly in the “Bent” section, for example. Are there dangers in this too? Do you ever wonder if you have gone too far?

MY: ‘Bent” is a good example. I didn’t want to just drop all the references and nuances of the word; it can mean curved or crooked; or determined; or bowing in submission; it has sexual meanings and engineering ones and moral implications; all of these surfaced as a result of exploring the medium. Just like a sculptor would investigate a particular piece of stone, getting a sense of its strata, its flaws, its densities, poets examine language and so can make use of layered meanings. Infertility is not just medical; it touches on mortality and family and sin and eternity. So I wanted to take one pass at it, and then come back from an entirely different angle, to give a more complete perspective.

CL: Even more so outside of the “Blackacre” poem I admire this; the fourteen Coloracre poems in the collection take on such a variety of tones, from the high-lyric, to the dry more legalistic, to the playful if no less dire ‘Goldacre,’ to the most closely narrative in ‘Greenacre.’ How do these work together, toward completeness? How do you see form and content as interacting?

MY: I’m misremembering it now, but I think C. D. Wright, paraphrasing Oppen, said that “Form is what makes the thing graspable. . . . Until it takes form you haven’t written it.” A poem has to become formally manifest in order to come into existence. Once you’ve said it, the way you’ve said it is the thing. And most poetic questions for me are ultimately questions of tone. Form ends up being merely a consequence of tone.

The rhythms in the “Redacre” poems have a twisted childishness, for example, or the “Blueacre” poem about The Passenger uses an inventory form, which is intentionally super flat and affectless. These seem like they wouldn’t work together in the same book, but talking across poems teases out complexities. The first “Greenacre” poem addresses money, the second race, and memory. To call them both “Greenacre” in that infertility series highlights the intersection between capitalism and family, race relations and shame.

CL: I’m fascinated by the power of shame. And so I was curious and looked up ‘stigma;’ I was surprised to find the Latin or Greek root “to tattoo.” Blackacre’s cover font reminded me of classic tattoos! And stigma does mark or tattoo us, in a sense; but stigma(ta) is also a sensory organ for certain animals, the site of fertilization for plants, so I wonder about the fine line between opening oneself up wide to the world and being wounded by it. Does your work aim to do that? To draw attention to our scars so as to erase them?

MY: I had never looked up “stigma” before; that’s great. And you’ll be happy to know we had Blackacre temporary tattoos at my book launch party! But it’s interesting the way it marks women and not men. The same stigma doesn’t exist with sterility. Margaret Atwood notes in The Handmaid’s Tale that we don’t use the term “sterile” to refer to men. We don’t approach it or think of it in the same way as with women, where the implication of “infertility” is that the body is not fulfilling its use. And since it’s not, this wastefulness is shameful. Shame is a silent sort of self-consciousness, but speaking, putting it all out there, eliminates the embarrassment. To declare, “here it is, I have this medical condition, think what you will.”

CL: Is that something that poetry is uniquely suited to do? The poem as the public-private reflection?

MY: I don’t know about uniquely; I think there are other modes that can do some of that work—but poems definitely can.

CL: It seems that poems act as the throat clearing in the silent room—the “ahem” of “look,” or “hold right here,” of “would you ever have thought”—did you consciously think of Blackacre as an un-shaming, or un-silencing?

MY: Silence has always been palpable for me, as something that I didn’t want to intrude upon without reason. I’ve never been someone who has taken permission to speak for granted, permission to take up other people’s space and time. On the train I’m the person enforcing the quiet car—you better have something important to say to break the silence. And so whatever poem comes must withstand the default of that silence.

I think this stems from when I was practicing law—people would bill per 6-minute increment—and so you got ten people in a room and that was a very very expensive meeting; you didn’t want to waste anyone’s time. So I think the sparse nature of Ignatz came out of that opportunity-cost mentality, and you can see it in the Hanged Man poems too. It can also become a pathology—what gives you permission to speak and the pressure silence places on it—so in Blackacre I tried to push beyond form as an excuse or permission to do so.

Going back to form as determined by tone, right, I had so many stories, voices surrounding infertility always in my head, which I think were the most negative aspects of the experience. I tried to include some of those voices—like C.S. Lewis’ epigraph, the Peter Pan story, or even the epithet “Twinkie”—by presenting and reworking those voices. You have to name something in order to exorcise it.

CL: And yet, you don’t name things outright. So much of this book plays off association and imagination, like the bull Pasiphaë at the end of the eleventh section, which is basically gesture. Sometimes just mentioning the shadow of something, or situating a poem with some framework or context in mind gives it entirely new (and maybe entirely different) valences. Not unlike the arm the speaker knows exists under the lake water in the second “Greenacre” poem, the epigraph about white noise, for example, before a more explicit “Goldacre” piece, has a trove of submerged resonances. How do you balance conjuring other voices with departing from them? How explicit do you strive to be?

MY: As far as Pasiphaë, I wasn’t really that concerned whether readers “got it,” and sometimes it’s exhausting to think about taking on an entire network of myth. But it was important to me to include; it was a figure with whom I identify, in some ways. Often I’m interested in what is not said, because that silence affords space for the reader to enter. She determines what the poem becomes and brings certain things to the reading of it.

CL: Which is sort of how the book starts; in “Palinode,” you begin “I was wrong / please I was / wrong please I / wanted nothing please / I don’t want.” And we are unsure about the desire, about the blame and so must fill it in for ourselves. It’s almost like facilitating, or curating a reader’s discovery—

MY: Yes, that confession is supposed to suggest infinite possible mistakes— I know some people believe you should lead the reader through the work like a bull with a ring through its nose or something, but that seems to limit the poem, and the reader, as well. More and more I think the true medium of poetry is the reader’s expectation, rather than anything that exists physically on the page.

CL: That’s fascinating. Yes, I’m always surprised and delighted at what people glean from poems, as though it is far beyond what I had intended or imagined—and this seems to be the real life of the poem, when it is beyond its inception and takes on a new life. It’s interesting that we think of a poem as living in readers’ expectations—they are a part of the creative yield too. What are you up to now? Are you writing new things?

MY: I’m trying to let myself not write, right now, since there’s so much going on. Reading and hopefully thinking. I think next I’ll continue along the lines of the more narrative “Greenacre” poem or the Twinkie poem. To address deracination, or question the assumptions of authenticity that people base racial identity on. But I’m teaching a lot this fall and have a young son, so that takes up a lot of my time.

CL: You’re also starting The Racial Imaginary Institute with Claudia Rankine, correct? Can you speak about that?

MY: It came out of a project of Claudia Rankine’s: the Racial Imaginary, a project and later a book that looked at how race takes up residence in creative acts and those acts have real world consequences. It’s still in its infancy, but the Institute will eventually be a space for exhibitions, readings, talks, presentations, who knows, really—I think we see ourselves as curators for what we can’t even envision, yet—with respect to race and the creative imagination.

CL: It’s such an important and exciting project; I’m excited for it. I have one last question for you—if you were to sit down with someone who had never encountered a poem before—or maybe only in stereotypical ways—what one would you give him or her?

MY: I often face some version of this problem. At Princeton, I have the joy of teaching extremely smart, extremely dedicated students, but, especially in my introductory sections, many of them come to the class with no real idea of how to read a poem, and no experience reading contemporary poems. Some of them have been to good schools, some have been to terrible schools, but to the extent that they have been taught poetry at all, they mostly have been taught not to look at the poem itself, but to look through the poem for its “real meaning,” to decode it. They’re being taught the paraphrase of the poem rather than the poem itself. But, the motto I repeat over and over again in my workshops is, I’m not nearly as interested in what the poem means as I am in what the poem does. I’ve found Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” to be the single most useful poem for cracking open old attitudes. Its surface meaning is so apparently available, so present, that the students don’t feel the need to “decode” it. And to see how many different answers the class can generate to what the enjambment does really helps them think of a poem as a consequence of particular choices by a particular artist.