Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. Last year, Bloodaxe Books published the UK edition. He is also the author of four chapbooks, most recently GESUNDHEIT! (Glass Poetry Press, 2019), a collaboration with Sam Herschel Wein. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and Best American Poetry (2015 and 2019). He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is co-founder of Underblong, an online poetry journal. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: In “Poem In Noisy Mouthfuls,” a friend says “All you write about is being gay or Chinese” a pronouncement which rankles with the speaker as he tries to untangle homosexuality from life plans from family narratives, or memory from immigration from coming of age. Can we ever separate these things? The poem concludes:

…Wish I had said, No, I already write about everything—
& everything is salt, noise, struggle, hair,
carrying, kisses, leaving, myth, popcorn,

mothers, bad habits, questions.

I hate the “what are your poems about” question, (everything, nothing!) and often think of MacLeish and his line “a poem should not mean but be.” So at the risk of abstraction, what are your poems? How would you characterize them, or their concerns?

CC: Like many poets, I’m in love with how the word “stanza” comes from the Italian for “room,” or more literally, a “standing place.” I love thinking about how poems consist of rooms and can stand as houses, live as meeting places. I obsess about what kind of meetings a poem can bring about—surprising ones, strange ones. Maybe meetings that wouldn’t be possible in life: between the living and the dead, for example. Or, between my queerness and my Chineseness and my Americanness. For years it seemed impossible for these experiences and identities to enter the same room, to sit in chairs next to each other, or to stand, say, in a kitchen, next to each other, noisily eating popcorn. Poetry, for me, started off as a way to create spaces in which seemingly impossible meetings could occur—and to turn those meetings from an impossibility or a rarity into a fully present experience. I have lots of other reasons for writing poems (the pleasures of language, imagination, formal experimentation, etc.) but this remains central: poetry as space making, as building meeting areas and providing the snacks.

At least, that’s my hope. I don’t usually sit down and think, Okay, time to create a meeting place where all my selves and histories can converse! Doing that just tends to lead to a lot of sitting and not much writing (though sometimes a lot of sitting is wonderful, too). I try not to start with too many preconceptions and lofty goals. Often, the kind of meeting I first have in mind has more to do with particular images and peculiar sounds—a cat meeting a zombie meeting some alliteration, perhaps.

But ultimately—much later, during serious revision and when I’m starting to feel ready to send the work out—I do want my poems to offer something more than the zany and the zingy (though that is a combo I love and incidentally it would also be the title of the 400-episode soap opera I’d write and produce and star in: The Zany and the Zingy). Or, not “more than,” but “also,” “juxtaposed with,” and “intertwined with.” So, it’s at this much later stage in the writing that I ask: is something really happening here? Have I learned something? In this conversation or collision (a type of meeting, too) on the page, is there weight alongside the levity? Does the lightness become an illumination? I’d like my poems to say (to myself, to a reader): you can bring all of yourself into these rooms, including what you have yet to know about yourself, your worlds, your dreams. Your myths and questions, yes. Is the cat listening to the zombie and does the zombie listen back? I hope so.

CL: While there are so many aspects of your work I admire, a singular levity leaps from nearly all the lyrics in When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. The introductory poem, “Self-Portrait as So Much Potential” begins: “Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango. / As friendly as a tomato. Merciless to chin and shirtfront.” Which is a pretty light beginning, even as the poem continues, revealing the speaker’s fear of an unpromising future, at least to his mother. The poem ends: “They will be better than mangoes, my brothers. / Though I have trouble imaging what that could be. / Flying mangoes, perhaps. Flying mango-tomato hybrids. Beautiful sons.”

Laughing to keep from crying is nothing new, but beyond humor a certain playfulness infuses even the most painful of your poems. Would you mind discussing how you see levity functioning in your work? Does it come naturally or is it something you work to incorporate? Does it have limits?

CC: In the handful of years since my book came out, I’ve actually been challenging myself to write poems that aren’t funny, ones that don’t rely on humor or playfulness so much or at all. I don’t want the levity to become a mannerism, for my kind of fun to be a predictable “brand.” I don’t want it to be a safe move, though I am very much invested in humor as a form of armor or shelter, for the speaker who often is an alter ego, a persona based on me, a queer Asian American.

The levity comes from my life, from conversations with friends and my partner and my communities—it’s a survival tool, a resource for not letting homophobia and racism get me too down. And it’s a way of inhabiting these realities differently, of pointing out the absurdities of a patriarchal and white supremacist world. Sometimes, the levity is meant to encourage those whose identities and experiences overlap with mine—other queer people, and other queer people of color, in particular. And sometimes, the levity is meant to critique and speak back to the dominant culture and systems of oppression. Sometimes, the levity is doing (or trying to do) both simultaneously: encouraging those who need encouraging (a shelter) and tackling that which needs dismantling (an armor against / a hammer to chip away with).

At the same time, the humor and whimsy are a way (a secret tunnel?) into vulnerability—armor as well as something disarming, for the speaker. And for the reader, too, I hope. I think often about how real laughter is not a conscious phenomenon; you don’t decide to laugh, then laugh. You burst. Sound spills out. Some internal tickle (unless you’re literally being tickled) is made audible, visible, present. A little spit might fly out. Or a lot. You might cry from laughing so hard. Your belly might ache—while your heart sings operatically (who knew your heart had such talent?). It is a physical joy and it might hurt, in a delicious way. Strange: that something could at once comfort and sort of unsettle, jostle. Shake you up. Strange: how this thing causes you to be at once more within yourself and so outside.

Again, I don’t typically start working on a poem with these larger aims in mind. Too, I am wary of being perceived or presenting myself as a spokesperson, a “representative” for my identity categories. I don’t want that tokenizing. I want the poems to embrace the multilayered and for the humor to be one method of getting there. A surprising method—I want the humor to be an unexpected and evolving aspect, not just “my brand.” In the last few years, I’ve written maybe two poems that seem effective, without using any funny biz. So, probably the levity is in my lifeblood, as a poet, and I need to keep finding fresh ways to inhabit it.

CL: Where so few people can write humorous poems, I smiled a little in hearing that you’re trying to write strictly serious ones—most people would kill for your voice and the complexity of it. I teach business communication with students from all backgrounds, languages, ages, etc. and across the board people struggle most with learning and navigating humor. Many lament the complications that have arisen because it doesn’t translate, and I find it impossible to teach. Or erase!

My students also love talking about branding, and whenever I hear the term I can’t shake its actual meaning—the scar (of possession!) it makes. Which ties into your mention of tokenizing, I think—a brand is often recognized by someone else, or determined through external opinion; on the other hand, one’s lifeblood is both intrinsic and singular. All and only yours. But since it is a common concept, as a poet do you think about your brand? Do you distinguish this from your ‘voice’? In what ways?

CC: I don’t think about having a brand as a poet, though it is fun to use the phrase “on brand” for a poem that feels particularly me. Like, a poem that references Sailor Moon in order to talk about empowerment alongside heartbreak. Or, a poem that was inspired by an Instagram post of a shirtless guy. I do think about branding in terms of my Internet presence—my Twitter is pretty poetry-focused; I tweet a lot about my writing process and where I experience poetry and politics meeting. And my Instagram is a mix of everyday selfies, travel photos, thirst traps, poems, and pictures of my dog. Facebook I update super sporadically; I’ve been thinking of getting off there for years (maybe a 2021 resolution!). I guess my brand online is playful yet melancholic…and also very gay. Also, lots of sweaters.

I’d say this brand overlaps with my voice in poetry to some degree, but I do see poetry as a place of wild expansiveness and surprise, whereas an online brand has to have a predictability to it—followers need to know what to expect. I don’t want to ever feel like I’m writing to fulfill a predetermined brand. That said, some of my tweets honestly feel like they can be counted among my best writing! Ultimately, I try not to think too much about “is this my brand?” when it comes to social media; trying to control that all the time takes too much energy. And with the poetry, I do generally take a different approach: I try to embrace mystery, over knowability.

CL: As someone without Twitter or Instagram, and also without a collection of poems, I both marvel at and am wary of the ‘follower’ component. In other artforms it’s easier to separate the artist from the work itself, but with poetry they’re so conflated (if not in fact, in people’s perceptions). This fusion, in addition to constant visibility, leads me to wonder what gets sacrificed in the process of curation. How does that differ from creation? Does this change the way you think about experiment or failure?

CC: I’ll use Twitter as my example for this response; I’m not sure yet how to apply this thinking to how I use Instagram. So, I do have to stop myself sometimes from tweeting a line that I’d like to use in a poem—or it’s a line that I think would really benefit from the context of many other lines, the context of a full poem. Other times, I go ahead and tweet the line, as I see the post as a “first draft” or simply a way to remember the piece of language (I’ll bookmark the tweet and come back to it later). My Twitter account can be similar to a writing notebook. I have to remember, though, that tweets are their own genre. Just because a tweet containing a line of poetry got a lot of likes doesn’t mean it’s a good line of poetry or needs to go into a poem or would work in one.

CL: It comes down to juxtaposition, doesn’t it? Sometimes it’s the way lines talk back and forth that starts to surprise me. And I love it when the poem feels in control and doing things beyond me. So much of humor is about surprise—in “Elegy for My Sadness,” for example, we begin with wanting “to be a sweetheart in every moment, / full of goats & xylophones, as charming / as a hill with a village in it…a village full of sweethearts.” which moves into recalling time as an exchange student when “one day my host sister / gripped my hand hard & even harder / said, SOIS HEUREUX. / BE HAPPY. & miraculously, / I wasn’t sad anymore. / All I felt was the desire to slap my host sister. /…I was angry in Paris, which is clearly / not allowed. One can be sad in Paris (I was), / & one can be in love in Paris (I was not), / but angry? Angry in Paris?”

I’m laughing, but definitely want to slap the host sister from half a world away. I’ve been let in on some teenaged interiority and—in addition to juxtaposition—levity actually stems from intimacy. Which makes me wonder how you balance interiority in your pieces? How do you think about address?

CC: Really, I read poetry—or any genre of writing—for the interiority. So, I deeply appreciate you highlighting this aspect in my work. I’m so glad it’s there, the interiority, and I think it’s the difference between a poem that impresses me and a poem that moves me. I say this both in terms of work I read and the work I try to write. I can admire a poem’s technique, but at the end of the day I need that sense that I’ve entered a living consciousness (and the author can be long dead, while the poem’s alive); a breathing and aching place and it’s spacious; there’s room for contradiction and room for a reader to walk around, pick things up, remember something they didn’t know they needed to.

I keep returning to the last stanza of Jean Valentine’s poem “Self-Portrait, Rembrandt, 1658”: “From the first time I saw you, / when I was young, / you held me in your own understanding exhaustion.” The speaker’s talking to the painting and she’s also talking to the painter. I’ve been questioning how useful the term empathy is—it’s so easily coopted by corporations and nonprofits and universities; it’s easy for institutions to say they believe in empathy, while doing little to change on a systemic and material level. But I do think interiority, maybe because it’s a clunkier word and so tied to writing, isn’t as appropriable. In any case, I read “you held me in your own understanding exhaustion” and I am held by the poem. I am in a space where exhaustion isn’t something to be ashamed of; nor is it turned into a positive that can be profited from, the way “hard work” so often is in a capitalist world. I’m allowed, in this poem’s spaciousness, to mourn what I’ve lost to exhaustion and to experience that mourning as a form of rest. I’m held and it’s not the speaker who claims to understand me; it’s an “understanding exhaustion” that she has received from another piece of art.

I love address, too, in poems. I keep thinking of Craig Morgan Teicher’s definition of a poem: “A poem is something that can’t otherwise be said addressed to someone who can’t otherwise hear it.” I don’t know if this statement completely applies to the poem of mine you’ve brought up, and specifically to that moment of teenage interiority (a great phrase, by the way). But there’s something about insisting so much on the teenager’s point of view in that passage that seems to resonate with Teicher’s notion that a poem is a peculiar form of communication—communication that’s less about making a point and more about fostering intimacy. I’m not trying, through the poem, to chide the host sister for her discomfort over my teenage self’s unrelenting sadness. I’m trying to make that feeling of being “so teenaged” palpable and textured, specific yet spacious—so that a reader can walk around in that feeling.

CL: Interiority implies an intimacy, and—I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to fathom genuine intimacy with an institution. While we’ve given corporations the rights of people, can a corporation have empathy? I think of the base páschein ‘to suffer’ and em—‘in or within.’ Would we expect an institution to suffer with us?

At least for me, the more history I read and the more systems I experience, the more I’m convinced for the macro level of anything to shift toward policies stemming from empathy, there has to be a tidal wave of individual hearts clicked on, millions and millions of dinoflagellates sparked to luminesce. Since the personal is political, I wonder how or what light this might shed (terrible pun!) on what we ask poems to do? Or put differently, what relationship do ‘successful’ political poems have to interiority? What might the Teicher quote mean for writing across political or ideological divides? For its potential?

CC: These are such important questions. I’m not sure I can do them justice at the moment. I can start by saying that I think expecting empathy from corporations will most likely result in disappointment. Corporations are set up, it seems, to be unfeeling—their drive is to increase profit, not to expand deep emotional connection. Corporations can pretend to show interest in connection; or they can indeed show interest, insofar as such showing brings them more profit. Educational institutions aren’t all that different, ultimately. Poetry institutions, ditto. And I’d take this point further to say that poets and poetry can fall into profit-making over connection-making, too.

Maybe I’m being too cynical here. But I think this is the reality in a racial capitalist world: it’s all too easy to accept a performance of empathy when what you’re really getting is a marketing strategy. We’ve seen this with corporations, nonprofits, and universities all making statements “in support of” Black Lives Matter. Statements, but usually very little in the way of structural and material change. So, it might be good to be skeptical of shows of empathy; to stop focusing so much on being moved by a beautiful display of emotion and to move toward concrete action. Like, defunding the police. Firing racist leaders. Hiring Black people and people of color; paying them fairly and actually creating support systems for them. In terms of institutional change, I believe it starts with a redistribution of funding and resources. Poetry can explore this approach as a subject and theme, too.

I guess I’m tired of framing poetry as a method of persuading people with power to wield it more ethically. Why not a poetry of and for the disenfranchised? A poetry that examines alternatives to the status quo rather than a poetry that pleads to be accepted into it? A poetics that, from the start, is about exploring a radical politics? Honestly, I don’t know that I’m writing from this kind of poetics myself. Or I’m not doing that fully, yet. Or maybe I’m mainly a lyric-narrative poet of the everyday, with some radical moments. I hope I’m doing my part. I want to keep doing better.

Sometimes encouraging more empathy and feeling does lead to real change. And sometimes this focus leads to more wheel spinning. At the same time, not every poem needs to spark immediate political transformation. A poet interested in such change should participate in other activities—protests, organizing work, voting, mutual aid, community building, educating, etc. I do believe that a poem’s way of expanding the imagination can be a profound and long-term political act. But I want to be careful not to overgeneralize. Some poems restrict the imagination; some poems do harm. And some poems do harm by universalizing one kind of interiority, say a cis white interiority, as though that were the only subject position that matters.

For those attempting to write across political or ideological divides I think it’s important to ask, who and what created those divides? With this question, poetry has to engage with history; poets have to study history. On social media I’ve been accused (mainly by white men) of being “divisive” just for talking about race. But I don’t think we can get very far by staying quiet about power structures. I don’t think there is any “we” to inhabit without articulating how power operates and the possibilities for pushing back. What poetry, at its best, can offer here is a relationship to language that isn’t entirely dictated by the existing structures. Poetry, at its best, can redirect a soul from what is to what could be.

CL: So much of that redirecting comes by making language do something it doesn’t in prose, something that can’t be said any other way, and in this sense it seems only a shift away from the status quo could move us anew. Or a redistribution of attention, might be part of it too—where we apply ourselves? You may not call yourself a radical poet, but the lyric/narrative can also be radical, depending on what song it sings, what story it tells. I love the word ‘radical,’ because it is both fundamental (at the root) and extreme. What if we are extremely after what is fundamental? This is no small thing, to me at least. It brings me to the final poem in your collection, “Poplar Street,” where a speaker meets a stranger and wonders about what they might have in common, how they might be familiar, how family can become strange to us. The piece ends:

…Do I love my mother? Do I have to
forgive in order to love? Or do I have to love

for forgiveness to even be possible? What do you think?
I’m trying out this thing where questions about love & forgiveness

are a form of work I’d rather not do alone. I’m trying to say,
Let’s put our briefcases on our heads, in the sudden rain,

& continue meeting as if we’ve just been given our names.

What radical things—love and forgiveness, of continuing to meet, newly. If you met someone who had never read a poem before, what piece would you share with them, by way of introduction?

CC: Oh I love that you’re talking about the root of the word “radical,” which is from the Latin for “root.” A root word, a word-world of roots. Of course this makes me think of trees—how trees’ root systems are a kind of meeting place between trees, the earth, and water—which makes me think of Tomas Tranströmer saying “my poems are meeting places.” Yes. “Poplar Street” is about places of meeting, or where meetings might happen if we’re open to them, or how we might hope for a meeting place we don’t yet see. The poplar tree, which gives the street its name, and yet is not an actual presence on the street—that’s my way of pointing to a possibility, a fragile one, one that needs tending to, watering. And I’m thinking of these lines by Nazim Hikmet:

I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

(from “On Living,” translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk)

This poem is so alive, with knowledge of both life and death—with knowing that that’s what it means to be alive, as a human, on earth: to be living and dying at once, to know that, to forget that, to learn it again, to hold it in one’s hands as one plants olive trees. I think that’s what a poem can do: hold us in its thrilling root knowledges, remind us of the power and the fragility of our own breath.