APA Writer Series: Chen Chen On the Baggage of Language
Chen Chen’s second book of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is forthcoming from BOA Editions next fall. His first book, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a NEA fellowship. He teaches at Brandeis University.
Photo credit: Paula Champagne
by Rachel Lu
When Chen Chen popped into my Zoom room, the first thing I noticed was, well, him and his wonderfully tranquil, mustachioed smile, but second to that, I noticed his shelves and shelves of books. Having run out of shelf space a few days prior and been told by my mom that I should not purchase these bound paperbacks anymore, I was especially envious of such capacious display. However, Chen admitted that all was not as well as it appeared on Zoom—he too was running out of shelf space. Wow, I thought. We are but one and the same. We commiserated over the lack of shelf space—a universal problem, seemingly, for those who are perhaps a bit too fond of books and of keeping books. Below is our ensuing conversation, not on efficient book storage, unfortunately, but on his poetry, language, theory, praxis, and the like.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Rachel Lu: I remember the first time I read When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities and just cackling at certain lines. I would call my friends and force them to listen as I read the poem out loud. But your poetry ranges from laugh-out-loud funny to a humorous setup that can shift the ground below the reader's feet before she even realizes the potential for the ground to shift into this unstable ennui or inchoate yearning. How has your writing, and your use of humor, transformed in the COVID era, and in the wake of violence against Asians and Asian Americans?
Chen Chen: That's such a great and big question. First of all, thank you so much for reading my work, for really generous and kind comments about it. It still sort of surprises me to be honest even though I know that the book is published and it’s out there and people can buy it and check it out from the library. I'm still like, “how did you find it?” every time, because it comes from such personal and vulnerable places. A part of me is still used to it existing on my computer screen and for my eyes only. I’m really glad that it's found readers.
I think this is connected to what you’re asking, because I think writing, and I think especially for me writing poetry, has to do with tapping into these deep vulnerabilities and deeply personal experiences. Not that everything has to be directly autobiographical, but I think those deeply personal experiences, memories, obsessions, associations, all of those inform how one writes. Accessing those vulnerabilities during this time, during the pandemic, in the past year until this year, has been really difficult, because the world itself feels incredibly fragile, incredibly vulnerable in some old ways and in some very new ways as well with the virus and with the rise in anti-Asian violence all across the country.
For me, at least last summer, I had a lot of difficulty writing poetry actually, and I turned to essays, to creative nonfiction. I was asked by this wonderful editor at Poets & Writers Spencer Quong to contribute these essays on craft. They have this online series called Craft Capsules. I just leapt at that opportunity even though writing essays is a lot harder for me, but I appreciate the challenge because it took me out of my habitual approaches to writing, to being creative, and it allowed me to explore some of these subjects that were on my mind, including the pandemic, including the violence that's been happening, the racism. There was something about shifting to another form that allowed me to be vulnerable again on the page and also analytical about what's going on that I felt like I couldn’t do in poetry for some reason. Maybe because it becomes sort of habituated, how I sort of approach things in a poem. And also because, as you mentioned, I use a lot of humor, and I felt like to some extent that humor wasn't appropriate, or I didn't know how to use that in talking about the pandemic and the racist incidents. And so I just sort of find my way back into writing through another genre.
RL: That is so cool that you are working with a different form that is very different from poetry in a way. Please bear with me for my next question which is a little lengthy, but I’d like to use two quotes from you to frame my question. In one interview, you speak about how poetry can offer “a relationship to language that isn’t entirely dictated by the existing structures.” This had me think immediately about the ostensible objectivity of language when in fact it not only best serves those who know how to wield it, but it manipulates everyone’s perceived reality. The idea of language, who it belongs to and who it affects, is something you explore in "Kafka's Axe and Michael's Vest.” You write:
Though someone else (probably French) says our speaking
was never ours; our thoughts & selves housed
by history, rooms we did not choose, but must live in.
Think of Paul Celan, living
in the bone-rooms of German. Living, singing.
What does it mean, to sing in the language of those
who have killed your mother,
would kill her again? Does meaning shatter, leaving
behind the barest moan? This English, I bear it, a master's
axe, yet so is every tongue—red with singing & killing.
How have you co-opted the English language, which has been used for so long to oppress and colonize, so as to challenge “the existing structures?” And do you think that an individual's relationship to language can evade such power structures? Is it possible to create a space of healing when the framework itself, that is, language, is one born of historical violence?
CC: I think a lot about something that another poet Emily Jungmin Yoon has said (she also translates Korean poetry). I remember her saying this at an AWP panel back in 2019 in Portland, Oregon. She said, “poetry is a way to escape the language that governs us,” and I think about that a lot. There's something about poetry and the unconventional, sometimes very unconventional, ways that one can use language in a poem that pushes back against the expected forms of language and of English for me in particular, so that I don't feel so constricted by it in a way, or contained, or simply labeled by English in reductive or stereotypical ways. Poetry becomes a means to use English in ways that maybe were never intended for someone in my body, with my history, with my family being an immigrant family coming into the United States.
My relationship to English is one that maybe the language, or the people, never anticipated would occur. I think in some ways still in the United States, there are people in the dominant culture who wouldn’t expect me to use English to their standard, which is a construct in itself and a power construct. They certainly wouldn't expect me to play with language in the ways that I do or break certain rules within English to be able to articulate my experiences or express something from my imagination or explore the memories that I want to explore.
It’s interesting because I mention Paul Celan in that poem, and he's a poet who wrote in German and was a survivor of the Holocaust. His parents were both killed in the Holocaust. This deeply traumatic atrocity had occurred, not only in his life but on such a huge scale, so for him to continue using the German language was both a personal and a political choice. What does it mean to use the language of your oppressors? Such a huge question and issue, and one thing that's so amazing in Celan's work is that he breaks certain rules in German but also coins his own words, creates his own compound words, or uses words in very different ways. I think about that, because, to a certain extent, we don't ourselves invent language. We are born into it, we are socialized in it, we are educated in it, so it precedes us and has such a longer history than any of us who are currently alive. So we are entering into discourses and traditions in that language long existent, and poetry certainly has that, we can call it baggage in a sense, because it's such an old art form in any language. In many languages, it’s one of the oldest art forms, so yeah, there’s this tension, I think.
It's simultaneously this method for liberating oneself from the constraints of everyday language, or official language, or the official narratives, that come with that language, and at the same time it is a constraint. It's something that we inherit, and we have relationships to language that doesn't just come from us. It's highly relational, because so many people have contributed to the evolution of the language, so there is that tension. But if we return to the role of the poet as maybe not someone who can just invent language (because if you have a language, you need other people to speak to, to write to, who are in communication with you. That's still a purpose of language. It's not this completely private, insular thing. That couldn't exist that way), one of the powers of a poet can still be contributing to how a language develops. A lot of the words that we have in modern English today, for example, come from Shakespeare. He created these terms that went into his plays, and maybe a poet today doesn't have that much of an influence on the language as a whole, but I think we're each contributing to shifting and sort of developing language further through our writing, through our performing, and so on.
Poetry becomes a means to use English in ways that maybe were never intended for someone in my body, with my history, with my family being an immigrant family coming into the United States.
RL: And how did you stumble upon poetry and discover your relationship with language in this way?
CC: I started out as a fiction writer actually, and I just loved telling stories. Part of that was just my love of television, movies, sort of watching stories first and then getting more interested in reading too. But my mom is a wonderful storyteller too, and she'd always tell these stories of her growing up in Southern China. She has a great sense of humor and knows how to build a story, and I was influenced by that as well as just growing up in a multilingual household. My parents speak Mandarin. They also sometimes speak Hokkien with the particular kind of that dialect in the region that my family's from in Southern China. Having that mix of languages made me interested in language to begin with, because I was always like, yeah, people speak different languages. It was very normal to me that growing up, you would hear more than one language spoken on a regular basis. It's just become curious to me since growing up that that's really not the case for everyone, especially in the United States, that you can be monolingual for most of your life. For me, it was always the case that there was more than one language going on at home. So that sparked an early interest in language and what language says about culture and identity and immigration and your sense of belonging or not belonging. All of those themes and issues were important to me early on, but it wasn't until much later that I started to really delve into those topics in my writing.
For a long time when I was writing fiction, there would be very fantastical situations. It was more in the realm of fantasy or sci-fi for a while, and then I started to write more poetry in high school as an outlet, as a way to actually explore more private feelings and emotions that I didn't quite know how to express to other people yet. Some of those had to do with my sexuality, some of those had to do with feelings about my family and feelings around race and racism, experiencing that as an Asian American. Poetry became a way to process these really complicated issues and that gradually became more and more my interest. All of these things sort of converged—a love of story-telling, an interest in multiple languages and wanting to explore more personal and vulnerable subjects in my writing. That led me to become more and more interested in poetry.
Oh, and the other thing that I was going to say with your earlier question about language is that, more recently, I've been experimenting with using Mandarin Chinese along with English in my poetry. It was just something I dabbled with earlier on, but in this next book that's going to come out next year, there are several poems that do that in a variety of ways. I'm excited to see where that direction takes me.
RL: That is so interesting. Do you feel like you have a different relationship with English versus Mandarin?
CC: Definitely. Mandarin feels more emotional to me because it's so associated with my childhood and my relationship with my parents. Sometimes when I speak Mandarin, I feel more like a kid, I feel like I’ve regressed a bit. Also, because my vocabulary isn't as advanced, it's not like I can talk about politics very well, but you know, it's things that are sort of more everyday conversational topics that you would bring up as a kid. And so there's this sort of rawness to the language. That's how it feels to me whereas I feel like in English, it's a lot more layered in a way and sort of complicated and less direct maybe. It's sort of like I know how to be less direct in English but not so much in Mandarin, and so maybe that's why it also feels more emotional to me.
RL: I feel similarly with Mandarin and English. For some reason, Mandarin also feels more emotional for me or even more beautiful, but I struggle with whether I'm just exoticizing the language because I don't understand it well enough or whether there is actually a more poetic ring to it. Kind of on that note of language, you often show how language literally shapes reality, for example, in “In the City,” you write, “New York is an exclamation / I take, making my escape, away from the quiet snow commas of Upstate / & the mess of questions marking my Bostonian past.” And in “Didier et Zizou,” the hands are “ellipses, master / procrastinators.” Why use syntax, grammar, and language as metaphors to punctuate the speaker’s experience?
CC: I guess because I experience language in a very physical way. It's not just abstract or cerebral to me. I feel like my experience with language is very sensory and concrete and embodied. I love seeing other things in the world as sort of manifesting their own kind of language, sort of being able to speak. I think that's just an interesting imaginative leap to make. What happens when you can think of a city as a kind of language, or architecture, right? Architects talk about architecture as its own kind of language. Mathematicians talk about math as its own kind of language. I think it's just really interesting when you can extend that, and how that changes your perception of the world around you, when you think of things as having a language or being a language itself.
It's not like the theory is there to be like, okay, now you have to align or adhere your whole life to this one set of ideas, but it's there to be provocative and to be critical and to kind of add to your repertoire of how you think through those kind of decisions or dreams or goals in one's life.
RL: That actually really nicely segues into my next question, the idea of abstract/cerebral versus sensory/concrete, and, I guess, it’s a very broad question, but I’ll get into specifics of it. Essentially, what is the relationship between theory and praxis? There were two lines I was focusing on in particular from your book. From “Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls”:
Later, during my friend’s smoke break, still can’t come up with a worthy
response to his radical critique of homonormativity, of monogamy,
domesticity, front lawn glory. These middle class gays picking out
garden gnomes, ignoring all the anti-racist work of decolonization
that still needs to be done—don’t you think they’re lame? I say, Yeah, for sure,
but think, marriage, house, 1 kid, 2 cats—how long have I wanted that?
And in “Irreducible Sociality”:
No need to remind me of our mutual
friend, the professorial candidate, who’s
steeped in the most thoughtful
of French thought, like a plum
in sweet wine, & who tells us how
we must bow before the Other or else risk
our own dehumanization.
[...]
… It seems tonight
that neither of us can embrace more than
one Other, no matter how fine it sounds
in French …
In your poems, there seems to be a tension between grand, intangible postulates the speaker’s friends spouts and the speaker’s own reality and desires. Do you think theory distances, rather than concretizes, an individual’s relationship with the world around them?
CC: That's a really fascinating subject. I love reading theory actually, and I was in grad school for a really long time, so I read a lot of theory. I also found out that I don't really enjoy writing it myself, but I love reading it and talking about it. It can be incredibly powerful for shifting or reframing how one thinks about a subject or thinks about oneself or thinks about the world.
Just as an example, one of my favorite contemporary theorists is Sara Ahmed who has written several amazing books, but one of my favorites is called Living a Feminist Life. Another one is called The Promise of Happiness where she traces this political history of the concept of happiness and why we've become so obsessed with happiness as this ultimate gauge of well-being, health, and even justice and what the over-focus on happiness might prevent us from looking at. The concept of individual happiness might prevent us from looking at or caring more about collective well-being in a society. I find her work really interesting. She, in some of her works, writes in a very accessible style. It's not as jargonly, although technical terms in any field have their use including in theory. It really depends. There are some theory that I found really powerful and helpful and useful and some which can also be beautifully written too and some of it not so much any of those things.
I think sometimes there's a tension, and I’m interested in this tension between theory and praxis and things that maybe we idealize from a theoretical standpoint but don’t actually want in our life. That gap sometimes between a sort of ideal that might come from theory, that might come from something else, like romantic ideals or a romanticized picture of something or someone or some place and a reality that doesn't line up with that picture is really interesting. I also feel like in poems, I can admit to there being a gap. I feel like I can be honest about that even though I feel like the theoretical approach might push me in certain ways in my thinking, in my everyday life, in my actions, but maybe there are certain goals or dreams that I still have investment in that aren't this sort of theoretical ideal.
RL: Yeah, totally. I also love theory a lot, but I definitely can see how there are great ideas that challenge normative ways of thinking that are in direct conflict with what I want. I struggle with determining whether I want something because this is what I’ve been taught to want or if it’s the theory that doesn’t necessarily match up with reality. For example, in December, I was pondering whether a traditional same-sex marriage decenters the heterosexual nature of marriage or whether it places heteronormative ideals onto queer identities. So that was definitely an ideological conflict I was struggling with.
CC: I think in that case, when you recognize there's that sort of gap as I have been calling it, I feel like it doesn't mean that the theory is wrong, nor does it mean that your thinking is wrong. The theory can be there to make you aware of the choices and the thinking behind the choices and where those might come from. It can make you more aware of making a choice in the first place or sort of understanding how you might have more of a choice than you thought you did, and so that's valuable too. It's not like the theory is there to be like, okay, now you have to align or adhere your whole life to this one set of ideas, but it's there to be provocative and to be critical and to kind of add to your repertoire of how you think through those kind of decisions or dreams or goals in one's life. It can be there to push you. That's the thing I love about poetry too is that I feel like I can bring in ideas from the theory and I can bring in experience. It's not like one wins out over the other, but I can examine the negotiations between the two. That, I feel like, is closer, maybe, to the truth, or a truth, than if I just sided with one or the other.
RL: And finally, a question I love to end with so as to continue amplifying all the wonderful writers out there. Who are some of your favorite forthcoming or not as well-known APA writers that you enjoy reading?
CC: That's a wonderful question. Because her book just came out—I’ve been slowly reading it, so it's been on my mind—I recommend Muriel Leung's book. It's called Imagine Us, The Swarm, which is just such an innovative work. They are these essays in verse, so they combine poetry and essay in some really exciting and thought-provoking and thoughtful ways. The poetic essays in the collection look at, I mean it's a range of subjects, but it's focused on thinking about an Asian American politics that really thinks about class and labor in some powerful ways. A lot of that thinking is rooted in looking at the author's family, especially looking at her father's life. He worked in restaurants in New York City and died from cancer, and work stress had exacerbated or worsened his condition for a while. Part of what the book's looking at is often sort of invisible labor of immigrants and restaurant workers and, alongside that, this sort of very American investment, or over-investment, in work and productivity above all else, above taking care of yourself, above taking care of people necessarily, and the problems that arise from that mentality. But the book is also thinking about the power of the Asian American women and femmes, and it's just incredibly moving.
Rachel Lu is a Chinese American writer and undergraduate at Hamilton College, where she is the editor of its literary magazine, Red Weather. She has helped found and is the Operations Director of COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. She is a two-time recipient of the George A. Watrous Literary Prize for Poetry (2019, 2020) and a two-time winner of the Kellogg Essay Prize (2019, 2021). As a 2021 Levitt Research Fellow, Rachel's research focuses on 19th-century Gothic fiction and queer critical theory in order to understand the discursive, normalizing techniques that construct our contemporary understanding of homosexuality. An impenitent Goodreads addict, she will (perhaps too enthusiastically) proselytize its benefits to anyone within a five-mile radius of her.