APA Writer Series: Q&A with Iris A. Law
Iris A. Law is a poet, editor and educator living in the San Francisco Bay area. A Kundiman fellow and two-time Pushcart nominee whose poems have appeared in journals such as wildness, Waxwing, Dusie and The Collagist (now The Rupture), she is also founding coeditor of the online literary magazine Lantern Review. Her chapbook, Periodicity, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.
by Rachel Lu
I was walking in a blizzard with a friend one evening when he briefly mentioned the acknowledgements section of a book he had finished reading, which was filled with APA writers that had inspired the author. As he read through the list, I realized I only knew a few of them, and up until that moment, had only been consumed by a desire to read the canon, never realizing the homogeneity of the authors within it. This interview series is inspired by my search for the more diverse reading that has opened a window for me into the rich and inspirational world of writing penned by APA writers.
This interview was completed on June 2019 and has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Rachel Lu: I really love reading your poems. They're so visceral and have a lot of really strong imagery. Do you have a theme that you usually explore in your poems, or do you naturally gravitate toward a certain topic?
Iris A. Law: First of all, thank you. That's very kind of you. It depends. My chapbook is about historical women in science, and I use that as a lens by which to think about my own relationship with my father, who was a scientist. The project that I’m working on now is my full-length manuscript about losing my father. It's a lot of elegies, a lot of thinking about past grief. The language of science works its way in because that language was really important to me and my family growing up, and it very much shaped the world in which my family existed.
I grew up in a United Methodist church and a lot of words of the traditional services, even specific prayers as well as scriptures and psalms, are deeply embedded in my identity. I’m interested in thinking about what the modern psalm looks like. The notion of the psalms is an abstract one, so my question with myself is how to make that concrete, how to make that intimate and domestic and something that speaks to the music of the process of life and grief and love — one's spirituality. Music is really important to me in poetry: the sound of the line and the pace and rhythm of the poem.
I taught sixth grade language arts for a couple years, and my students really inspired me to think about poetry in new ways and have a childlike perspective on wordplay. I love thinking about new ways to create surprise, even in cliché or known language. I have a series where I’m taking terms of venery and thinking about new ways to conceive of that. I have one called “A Skein of Geese” that involves the geese actually sewing or embroidering a sky. There's a poem called “A Parcel of Deer” that is about what would happen if a cardboard box full of deer arrived at my doorstep.
I also wanted to write poetry that was accessible to sixth graders, rigorous adult poetry that could still be accessed by younger crowds. One thing I noticed when I was teaching was that it didn’t matter if the poem was really complex if it was about a character they were familiar with. One series I’m working on is from the perspective of Cho Chang, from the Harry Potter series. There's a big hole in terms of her characterization. JK Rowling doesn't write very much about her. Even her name's a little lazy. You got a Korean last name as a first name stuck with a Chinese last name, so what really is her story? She’s depicted as this weeping figure, and that is something that Harry despises her for throughout book four even though she's undergone this terrible tragedy where her boyfriend is killed almost in front of her. So I’m just trying to think about ways that I can reimagine her story to be more than just the grieving Asian young woman. What is her family life like? Why does her mother, who works in the Ministry of Magic, not want her to rock the boat, as a lot of immigrant parents often tell their children. She's saying “don't join the insurrection because it's not good. We have to make sure that we don't make waves or make people angry.” That anxiety that's always there about assimilation.
I had a mentor in college who advised us that you must always have a creative hobby that is not your writing because if the writing doesn't work out...It's a way to take a break from writing while still flexing a creative muscle.
RL: Who are some of your biggest influences and have they shaped the way you've written your poetry in any way?
IAL: It's changed over the years. Some of the poets that were really foundational for me were people like Li-Young Lee. He was one of the first Asian American poets whose work I read.1 He has two poems, "Eating Together" and "Eating Alone," which are about a trout in the steamer and how his father lies down to take a nap. Basically, it’s about the loss of a parent, and there's a contrast between eating together and eating alone that really spoke to me as a young writer. He's not just writing about meatloaf and spaghetti. He's writing about a trout in the steamer with slivered ginger and scallions, which is something that my family did all the time, so that the level of intimacy and the detail and precision of his imagery is something that appealed to me.
In terms of when I was starting to really think about putting together my own body of work for the first time, Kimiko Hahn. I admired her work before I started to write my MFA thesis and working on manuscripts for the first time, but she was the first Asian American poet I ever read. I didn't even know Asian American poets existed before. She has this outlook, this lens on the world through her poetry that is just really — there’s a courageousness about her language that I just love.
Denise Levertov. The way that she writes, especially about the spiritual, and her lyricism, the music of her work, really speaks to me. Jill McDonough was also important to me. She has a book called Habeas Corpus that is all sonnets, and they are persona poems from the perspectives of people who have been on death row in America. Louise Glück as well. The Wild Iris. Not because of my name but because of the way she engages again with persona. She's writing from the perspective of plants in many cases, which is really fascinating to me because usually persona is from the perspective of a person. I just love the way that she's able to inhabit the world or the body of something that is not her own voice and make that new and surprising and interesting.
RL: You mentioned discovering Li-Young Lee in college and that he was one of the first Asian American poets that you read. A lot of people don't take poetry classes in college, so do you feel that it's important to include more Asian American voices earlier on? I mean, the answer would be yes, but how do you do so in a way that balances the previous canon of poetry? In my past poetry class, diversity of voice was a concern and the professor’s response was that he did want to include more voices, but he only had so much time in the semester and so many different poems throughout the centuries to read. And we did read more diverse voices as we entered the modern and contemporary era, but we spent a majority of time reading older poems by old, white men. So, I guess, how would you achieve that balance?
IAL: That’s a really good question. I’ll start by saying I’m super biased because I edit Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry. Increasing the visibility of Asian American poetry and diversity in literature is something that I really strongly believe in. I appreciate the work your professor put in to choose a syllabus, and I have no doubt that he spent many hours choosing carefully. To be honest though, I feel like his response comes from the idea that there is a set canon that must be learned. As a person that is a huge English literature nerd — I majored in English literature and not in creative writing in college — I am all for reading foundational poets like Dickinson, Frost, Hopkins, the Romantics like Coleridge and Keats. I don’t think that it has to be done at the expense of other poets at other voices.
It depends on what kind of course you’re teaching. If you’re teaching a poetry survey course that’s supposed to span poetry written in English from the 17th century up until the 20th century, perhaps there's a little bit more of an argument in that the poetry written in English which you're going to be reading, especially before the 19th or 20th century, is mostly going to be from certain countries. But a lot of the foundational Asian American voices starts to happen in the 20th century, and that has to do with immigration as well. The first wave of super foundational literature — there's a few before — is John Okada, Mitsuye Yamada; these people are writing about Japanese internment, for example.
That's not to say you shouldn't include other voices. You should be including things that are reflective of the make-up of the country at the time. How can you read Whitman without reading immigrant voices as well? Because Whitman is writing about Americanness, and he's writing at a time in which immigration is something that people are thinking about in politics as well as during the Civil War, we have this whole question with what does it mean to be an American? The question of race in America is really forefront in everybody's mind after the Civil War. There’s no excuse for not including, maybe not Asian American voices, but definitely African American voices, Native American voices, thinking about diversity of even immigrant voices during that time period, whether that's Irish or Italian. The first Chinese immigrants were coming during that time period too, so while you may not have super well-polished texts at that point, you’re going to have oral histories. Definitely 20th-century, 21st-century, there is zero excuse. In my opinion, it's something that has to be done earlier. Classrooms need to diversify. We need trained teachers, and what can you teach that is simply more than just the expected? How do you teach about racism in America, for example, with more than just, “I love To Kill a Mockingbird!”
I think there’s just a need out there for poetry to be introduced earlier in classrooms, and for it to be something that’s just part of the way we live and breathe…And the earlier and more broadly we expose people to multiple voices and different kinds of poetry, I do think it’s possible to change the system.
In terms of poetry, one thing that I emphasized in my classroom is that I wanted my students to be able to see or experience work written by poets who look like them. A lot of them were Asian American, and so I did introduce a lot of contemporary Asian American poems into my classroom. Poetry is something a lot of people are scared of – we tend to think of it as a very precious, hard-to-access thing that’s shut up in the academy, not accessible, and as a result, teachers don’t know how to teach it. They’re unfamiliar with contemporary poetry. Sometimes poets themselves are not very good at selling their work to an audience that is not also poets. I think there’s just a need out there for poetry to be introduced earlier in classrooms, and for it to be something that’s just part of the way we live and breathe. I love what’s happening right now with novels-in-verse and memoir-in-verse. Brown Girl Dreaming, Inside Out and Back Again and The Crossover are popular middle-grade novels-in-verse that are introducing kids to poetry by diverse voices really early on, and I want for kids to not be afraid of poetry. I think that has a lot to do with how people come to teach very limited poetry curricula. Because what they’re exposed to are what their teachers were exposed to. And the earlier and more broadly we expose people to multiple voices and different kinds of poetry, I do think it’s possible to change the system. Now there are a lot of people that will tell you that that is not appropriate, like there is a Western canon and you cannot violate that. I would strongly disagree with them, and I think that maybe it’s just generational. I think younger people now have a huge value for diversity in ways that even I didn’t necessarily grow up with. I learned that in college; it’s a systemic thing, and change is possible, but it needs to be very intentional.
RL: How has community influenced your work?
IAL: Community is very important to me. I did an MFA at the University of Notre Dame, and the workshop community there was super important to fostering your development as a poet or as a writer. When I was at Notre Dame, my cohort was extremely diverse in terms of aesthetic style – I had a really great experience in the Stanford creative writing department as an undergrad, but Stanford is more known for more traditional lyric poetry. In grad school, I was encountering all these poets who were writing super avant-garde poetry that has the desire to shock and make the reader stop and think, “Is this poetry? Is this not poetry?” At first, I was intimidated, but I think I actually learned a lot from my cohort; the members of my cohort were very experimental and from my professors, like Joyelle McSweeney, who is extremely experimental. I learned so much about wordplay and language and performativity and voice from my classes with Joyelle and from getting to work with classmates.
Outside of that, community has been a lifeline for me, especially as a writer of color. When I was an underclassman in college, I didn’t know how to connect with other Asian American writers or other people my age who were interested in being a writer and who happen to be Asian American. Mia, my co-editor, and I started Lantern Review when we were both in our MFA programs because we were both graduate students writing in context where — I wasn’t the only writer of color at all in my program, but it’s a little isolating in the middle of country in South Bend, Indiana, which I think is a really cool place and has a really cool story too, but it’s not super diverse in terms of Asian American community. I wanted to learn more about the people who have walked this road before, as people who might understand. For a lot of us, this is something that our parents don’t understand. Being a poet is something that my parents were like, “What does that mean, are you going to starve? I’m not sure I like that idea? Maybe you should do something a little bit more traditional and make some money?” So I think that for a lot of Asian American writers, there’s that question of, “How do I do something that I don’t have models in my family for?” I think a lot of Asian families push their children towards a lot of other pursuits because the arts are considered respectable, but it’s not a profession that you should have. I appreciate that my parents did try to nurture my artistic inclinations, but they were a little unsure when I was like, “I don’t think I want to be a professor of English literature or get a PhD, I think I want to be a poet.” I was hungry for a group of people who have walked that road before and were able to tell me more about how they navigated that. And so Mia and I were lonely in our MFA programs, a little bit, and so we started this online journal and through that, we were able to connect with so many other Asian American poets throughout the nation, which was really amazing. We were really blessed by poets who were more established. For example, Barbara Jean Reyes, Luisa A. Igloria, Oliver de la Paz, Jon Pineda, they were like “Hey! How can we support you?”
Community has been a lifeline for me, especially as a writer of color…I think it’s important in the life of a writer to not feel alone, especially because for writers of color, the literary world can be very isolating.
I did apply and get into Kundiman, a fellowship for Asian American writers, after graduating from my MFA. It’s been a place where I can write about family safely; it’s a place where I feel understood. It was a network when I was living in Kentucky. There was a Kundiman South group and we were all in different states but we would Skype or Google Hangouts once a quarter or every few months and it was like having family who understood you there. I think it’s important in the life of a writer to not feel alone, especially because for writers of color, the literary world can be very isolating. Sometimes, in workshop settings, there’s an expectation that you are going to write about certain things, or you run into uncomfortable situations in which other people are writing about your culture in appropriative or awkward ways. I remember a situation where I was in a workshop where a very well-meaning person not of Chinese heritage wrote about the Walled City in Hong Kong, which was a very very poor area of Hong Kong. But the poem made me very uncomfortable because it romanticized the idea of the red light district, grime and prostitution. There were all these references in there that didn’t quite place. For example, they had Pachinko, which is not a Chinese game. The poem was also exploring the idea of opium. I felt really uncomfortable with the way it seemed to exoticize and even play into some stereotypes. I don’t think the writer did that intentionally whatsoever, but I remember just for me, another tipping point was that another member of the workshop who also said, “I feel uncomfortable.” And another member of the workshop stepped in and said “I don’t understand why you feel uncomfortable. This is obviously accurate. Opium came from China.” The whole reason that Hong Kong was a British colony was because the Opium War was fought and it was basically the spoils of the war for the British.
It’s not that people intend to be mean or racist. These are wonderful people and colleagues that I get along with in real life, but there’s a sense of not being heard or understood sometimes that you can feel as a writer of color. It’s really important for young writers of color and in general for writers of color to have a community or network that you can call upon. Kundiman has been, like I said, a lifeline for me in terms of having the freedom to write about things that are hard to write about, like my dad’s passing, for example, in spaces where I don’t feel judged or misunderstood, where I feel completely seen and heard. It’s also been really amazing in terms of the generosity of people and how they give of themselves to help one another succeed. Opportunities, people being willing to submit to a magazine, to publish my work, to talk to me about my writing and even encourage me. So that’s something that’s been really important to me and something that I’m trying to give back as well however I can.
RL: In recognizing APA writers and poets, do you think it’s also categorizing them or defining them in a way that’s kind of limiting? Do you think it’s important to create that distinction? Does that make sense?
IAL: Do you mean is the label APA poet limiting?
RL: Yes.
IAL: I would argue it’s not, because it is something that one can choose to identify with. I think there’s a freedom in being able to choose that and define it in a way that you choose to define it. When I say that I’m an APA poet, that does not mean that I am writing about things one would traditionally associate with Asian American identity. In fact, when Mia and I select poems for Lantern Review, we are explicitly looking for things that go beyond the understanding of, “Oh! I’m writing a traditional immigrant narrative. I’m writing a poem about Asian food or how I was misunderstood.” Those are important experiences to bear witness to within the Asian American narrative, but we’re also curious as to how are people doing things, exploding the definition of Asian American poetry in ways that are new and exciting.
When you say an Asian American poet, the Asian American part is not applied to your poetry. That is your identity. You are a poet writing from the perspective of being someone who claims Asian American identity, which is something that one chooses to claim. Because the term Asian American is a political term that was developed in the late sixties, seventies as a way to unify many different groups — it’s a pan-ethnic identity. It’s the idea of bringing communities together to fight for justice and to be heard. When I call myself Asian American, that has to do with not just my political stance but the orientation from which I’m viewing the world and my place in the world and choosing to claim my space for myself, for my community. It does not necessarily reflect on the content of what I write. And there are many ways to explore who I am that involves my ethnicity. That doesn’t mean I’m going to do that in expected ways in my poetry. I’ve heard writers who have expressed that anxiety before. Younger Asian American writers especially, but I think if you look at the history of what it means to claim the term “Asian American,” I think it’s very clear that it’s not something that should ever be a limitation on what you write. I do think that sometimes it does get leveraged against writers of color by outside forces to pigeonhole, which is very unfortunate. But I think the way that we work against that, like for Lantern Review, is to publish work that defies the norm, that is on the cutting edge of what it means to be Asian American and to be writing poetry.
RL: Who are some of your favorite forthcoming APA writers or poets that you like to read?
IAL: That is a really hard question. When you say “forthcoming” do you mean people who have books coming out next year?
RL: Yeah.
IAL: I could tell you people who have published recently. In terms of books coming out later this year? Let’s see…
RL: Answer it however you want to answer it.
IAL: Okay, well I’ll talk about recent books and forthcoming books that I’ve really enjoyed or I’m looking forward to. So Mia, who is my co-editor at Lantern Review. Her recent book, Isako Isako, came out last fall. It’s a really amazing look at family history and female voices in her family history. It engages with the history of internment, but she’s looking at more than just that history. She’s looking at the voices of women in her family and playing with things like what does it mean to redefine grammar and creating a new language for this composite character who’s inspired by her grandmothers.
Sarah Gambito’s newest book, Loves You, is really amazing. It’s lush and warm, and Sarah’s super warm personality-wise as well. She and Joseph Legaspi founded Kundiman together and I think Kundiman really carries forth the legacy of their really warm and nurturing personalities. Anyway, her book is this exploration of food and family. And there are some actual recipes mixed into it as well as recipes that are more poems that take the form of recipes. She experiments with that form, she experiments with voice and with the question of family and what does it mean to claim certain foods as home spaces and even to reclaim certain foods. There’s a type of cookie that is popular in Spain that’s called a Filipino. And so she kind of reclaims that, “please don’t eat Filipinos” in the particular poem.
I’m looking forward to Oliver de la Paz’s new book that’s coming in late summer or fall called The Boy in the Labyrinth. It’s a very personal book for him. All his poetry is quite personal, but he has kids who are on the autism spectrum, and I think this book comes out of thinking about his relationship with his sons and how his sons experience the world differently from other people, from people who are neurotypical. It’s thinking about more neurodiversity and language and the space in which we create for ourselves in our world.
Lee Herrick is definitely one of my favorite Asian American poets. His most recent book, Scar and Flower, is gorgeous — the intimacy and the level of tenderness with which he writes. I’m not sure I know another poet who has such tenderness in his writing. And it’s done in such a way where that tenderness feels like a statement, like an argument for tenderness and kindness even in the face of school shootings and police violence in some cases. How can you write about atrocity with a voice that involves tender empathy while still speaking up for justice? I love that book. It’s gorgeous.
Important books to keep on one’s radar in terms of the world of Asian American poetry that are recent: Fatimah Asghar’s book If They Should Come For Us, Franny Choi’s book Soft Science, Kenji C. Liu’s Monsters I Have Been, Sally Wen Mao’s book Oculus, Ocean Vuong’s book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
I love Ocean’s work. We were really really lucky to get to publish a poem of his in our first issue. This is kind of a cool story. At that point, he was still not that well-known and so we published the poem, and it’s been really cool to see his star rise over the years. Not that we had anything to do with it, but it’s really cool to watch him. I’m really looking forward to his novel. I really love his prose. He’s written some beautiful essays for The New Yorker, and I’m looking forward to his novel as well.
1 Note by Iris A. Law: The tradition of styling the term "Asian American" without a hyphen dates back to the late 50s and 60s with the early Asian American movement. The hyphen, many argued, made the term "an Asian-American" into a compound noun wherein "Asian" and "American" were set on opposing poles of a dichotomy — thus implying grammatically that Asian Americans (even those who were US born) were somehow not fully American, an idea that bought into the harmful stereotype of the perpetual foreigner. By contrast, styling the term as "an Asian American" (without the hyphen) set up "Asian" as an adjective modifying "American" — in other words, implying that an "Asian American" was a kind of American. Much has been said about this topic since, and today, dropping the hyphen in not just "Asian American" but all such ethnic identifiers, such as "African American" or "Mexican American" (whether used as a noun or adjective), is now widely allowed by major style guides, including Chicago, MLA and AP. For more on this topic, consider the following informative reads:
•https://consciousstyleguide.com/drop-hyphen-asian-american/
Rachel Lu is a Chinese American writer and undergraduate at Hamilton College. She is the co-editor-in-chief Hamilton’s literary magazine, Red Weather, and she has helped found and is the Operations Director of COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. She has been recognized for her work by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and has received the George A. Watrous Literary Prize for Poetry and for Most Promising as well as the Kellogg Essay Prize. Rachel misses the sun at her home in the Bay Area.