Terrance Hayes
Interview with Andrew Chi Keong Yim
Note: Andrew Chi Keong Yim was selected as the winner of Washington Square Review’s New Voices Award in Poetry by guest judge Terrance Hayes. As part of the contest, the winner had an opportunity to be interviewed by Hayes. The following is their email conversation.
Andrew Chi Keong Yim is from Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is the Martha Meier Renk Fellow at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
TERRANCE HAYES: How did you come to poetry?
ANDREW CHI KEONG YIM: Around the middle of undergrad, I took a class on West Coast hip hop taught by Kiese Laymon. Some friends I made there sort of ferried me along toward the slam poetry organization on campus. That brought me into a community at a time when I really needed one—my family had recently entered into what would become a years-long period of housing insecurity and I was 5000+ miles away from them, surrounded by castles. It was cold all the time. Poetry gave me a way to feel all that.
It’s been about nine years since I started writing poems. I’ve spent maybe three of those years actually writing. There was a long middle period where all my time went to figuring out how to be a decent teacher and pay my rent. I used to worry that poetry had left me, but I don’t worry about that anymore. It’s one of the few things that feels intuitive to me, and I’ve learned to see the time in between as a part of the writing too.
TH: You display a confident, diverse range of forms and structures while exploring the themes of family and place with maturity and depth. You do it all. This feels like a project of some sort. Can you talk about unifying principles in your submission? What is the relationship between “First Theory” and “Second Theory,” for example?
AY: I’ve been trying to work through my relationship to protection and silence for a while. I love my family so much. I feel particularly connected to my mom, my step-dad, my brothers, and my grandparents. But we don’t talk very often, especially not about our struggles or anything difficult. I understand these silences as a strategy for protecting one another, but it’s also scary and can make me feel helpless. My poems are attempts to speak across that silence, to say: I know why we’ve been this way. I’d like if we could change.
There are concrete preoccupations that run through a lot of my poems because they run through a lot of my thoughts: labor and commerce, diaspora, displacement, the carceral state, wanting to be better at basketball (not featured in these poems). I have a series of “theory” poems I’m working on that are trying to answer a pretty simple question—what’s making me sad? The first move of each of those poems is to try to locate the answer in something concrete and probably unrelated. A lazy eye. A table. An attic. Other Asian people have told me that this is a very Asian thing to do. I don’t have another explanation for it, so I guess I believe them.
TH: Does a poem like “The Binding” (“Every mouth names its sacrifice.”) bring any sort of resolution? What happens when you finish a poem?
AY: I used to go to this mega church on Oahu with my mom. Looking back on it, a lot of what was going on there seems a little dubious, but it provided a sense of community my mom really needed at the time. I remember hearing the story of Abraham and the binding of Isaac. I just kept thinking “How did they go home together after that?” I thought about that for six or seven years, then I wrote this poem.
Also in my head while I wrote, were scenes of violence my parents had mentioned from their childhoods, and the historical backdrop of China’s one-child policy. I tried to move through these different rooms to examine the long trail of violences experienced as a child. What does it mean to be sacrificed by those who are meant to protect you? I don’t have a resolution for that. When I finished the poem, the same question lingered. How do we go home together after all of this?
TH: What sorts of other writing do you do? Do you maintain a daily writing practice, a daily poem-writing practice? Do you keep a diary? Do you work from notes or a notebook?
AY: I’m a pretty scattered/distracted person. I try to keep a notebook, but then I’ll struggle to interpret my own notes days later. I’ve never kept a diary or journal, and notes have never been the genesis of my poems. I like to go on walks and turn the same handful of phrases over in my head for a while. I split my time between Queens, New York and Madison, Wisconsin. Walking in New York has led to a number of poems.
I’ve been writing fiction and nonfiction here and there. A lot of the work I do in my poetry is narrative, so the leap has felt pretty natural. I’ll be giving playwriting a shot over the next couple of months. It’s my goal to have a daily writing practice. In the past, I haven’t been able to sustain that. Working in multiple genres is exciting to me and I think the variety will keep me interested and motivate me to write more consistently as I toggle between projects. First I need to start said projects.
TH: “First Theory” blends emotional/angst and physical worlds. Dreamlike memory is held by this haunting image of building and abandoning a table alone in a city. Place and diction intertwine in names: “Palolo,” “Kaimuki,” “Gongong,” “Kaneohe,” “Anna Popo.” “In Lahaina, the largest banyan tree in America is ash.” What kind of research goes into such a poem?
AY: Essentially no research at all, beyond the practices I have in my daily life. I try to keep up to date and check up on news from home as often as I can. The names and diction of home are always with me, so it’s not a separate process to excavate them. Long grieving and immediate griefs intertwined as I processed the recent and distant loss of family members, and the tragedy of the wildfires in West Maui. When I work through memory, I try to record it as I remember it, though it’s entirely possible I’ve been filling in and revising memories in my head for years. I think this lends itself to fragmentation and a certain ghostliness, and it helps the sequencing of images and moments in a poem to be associative and make leaps.
TH: Have you seen Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues and/or his Long Day’s Journey into Night? His famous long single tracking shots (forty-one minutes in Kaili Blues) are essentially visual poems. The blur/collusion/collision of dream and memory in “First Theory” brings the rhythm of his films to mind. What other interests do you have? What are your other influences, who are your muses?
AY: I haven’t seen either, but I’ll try to soon!
Outside of reading contemporary literature, the biggest influence in recent years has been my work as a teacher. I think that learning to work with middle-schoolers fundamentally changed my brain and geared it toward an appreciation of strangeness. Kids are hilarious.
Some of my muses are, in no particular order: oceans, the New York Liberty, cool pants, Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, malls, Playoff Jimmy Butler, grandma pies (the pizza), grandmas (the people), the 7 Train, the Koʻolau Mountain Range, Media Day Jimmy Butler, Japanese Breakfast, Wong Kar-wai, and trying to get through a grocery store with no basket while holding a package of tortillas with my neck.
TH: “Each day, we practice our aloneness.” Can you talk about its resonance as an aesthetic or philosophical statement?
AY: I think that’s almost an anti-philosophy for me. It’s an acknowledgement of a past or current condition and something that I’m actively working against. I write a lot about distance and aloneness, but my project is to transform this into a reaching out toward others, particularly family.
TH: “Second Theory” inhabits the mindscape of the ‘fake house’ and ‘fake child,’ an irreverent haunted texting chain that ends with the text “from beyond the grave who sent back / rather quickly 這是緊急情況 which we all assumed / meant something something something uphill both ways.” What is the relationship between obligation to fact/autobiography versus imagination/ fantasy? What about the relationship between design and intuition? What is your revision process?
AY: As a child, I made things up, imagined things, in order to understand my life. I think a lot of people do this. A lot was kept from me as a child, even into adulthood, I think as a means of protection. In order to make any sense of it, I’ve had to fill things in. Even if I weren’t a writer, I’d be doing this. Any attempt at autobiography would have to include my imaginary life because it’s often the medium through which I experienced the life that was in front of me.
I hadn’t considered the play between design and intuition at length before your question, but I think it’s really fruitful for me to keep thinking through. I’ve never thought of myself as a planner. I’ve never outlined a story or poem before writing. But most of my poems that seem to “work,” I’ve more or less written in my head over a few days, then sat down and reproduced on the page. Is this intuition or ephemeral design?
Having started out in slam poetry, my original idea of “how to do poetry” was to write a poem and then commit it to memory as quickly as possible. Sometimes this leads to poems becoming fixed objects in my mind, and I struggle with seeing them for their parts. “The Binding,” for instance, was written years ago in two sittings, and in the time since, I’ve changed one line and the title. Some teachers have reassured me that I might be someone who either writes poems that work right away or poems that don’t work and are moved on from. I can appreciate this, since I used to see it as a major flaw that I had a tough time with revision. However, I’d also like to push myself and get better at working with the poems that don’t immediately click.
TH: In “Thaw” you write, “i unearth my scraps in / threadbare genes and recall tackling my father / gilded memory his bones bound in wood / flooring held beneath me my borrowed hands.” Can you talk about its resonance as a thematic or personal motif?
AY: I choose to love my father. I choose also to grow beyond what he taught me, the violence of men passed on by men. To be better, I need to look honestly at what could be my worst. I think there’s a path through that work toward relearning how to be open to tenderness and joy.
I wrote “Thaw” while waiting for an order of sesame tofu in a Chinese take-out place in Poughkeepsie, New York. Somehow that feels relevant.
TH: Painter Mark Rothko once offered a formula for making a work of art:
There must be a clear preoccupation with death—intimations of mortality
. . .
Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. Tension. Either conflict or curbed desire.
Irony. This is a modern ingredient
Wit and Play . . . for the human element.
The ephemeral and chance . . . for the human element.
Hope. Ten percent to make the tragic concept more endurable.
How does this compare/contrast with your notion of poem/art and poem/ art making? What do you prioritize in poems and poetry?
AY: Yeah, that list pretty much checks out. The one amendment I’d make is to replace the “preoccupation with death” with a preoccupation with loss more broadly, and that it is not inherently a tragic thing. Although the poems I’ve shared here contradict this idea completely.
In workshop with Amy Quan Barry, I was prompted to think about a taxonomy for my poetry. I ended up placing narrative at the top, but I’m starting to have second thoughts. The music of language is what really draws me to poetry, and I think it’s what propels my work forward and helps poems get stuck in my head then find their way onto a Google Doc. I like poems that get lost, make reckless U-turns, wake up in a daze on uptown trains when they’re meant to be going downtown. I love when poems take me somewhere unexpected.
TH: In his 1957 short manifesto, “The Creative Act,” French Surrealist artist, Marcel Duchamp, wrote: “I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who . . . insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act . . . ” but actually “the artist, as a human being, full of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world, plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work.” How does this compare/contrast with your notion of poem/art and poem/art making? Who is your ideal audience? What do you expect/want from your readers?
AY: At the end of a long semester of teaching, I feel like I often emerge with white-out and pencil shavings in my hair and an unexplainable limp, hoping someone learned something. I think writing is kind of like this. I know very little about Marcel Duchamp, but I think we’re in agreement.
I don’t have an ideal audience. It means a lot to me that people are reading my work. I hope that the work can take on meaning for them.
TH: Are there more poems?
AY: Yes! I’m excited to share them.