On Hope, Mystery, and Friendship: An Interview With Franny Choi

By Maslen Ward

My sister gifted me Franny Choi’s collection Floating, Brilliant, Gone when it came out in 2014, and I have been her massive fan ever since. If you haven’t yet listened to VS (the podcast she used to host with Danez Smith, with the newest season hosted by Brittany Rogers and Ajanae Dawkin), now is the time to check it out! I was extremely excited when I heard she had a new collection coming out in 2022, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. It was an honor to sit down with her over Zoom to talk about her newest book, what hope means to her, the role of friendship in her practice, and much more.

Franny Choi is the author of the chapbook Death by Sex Machine and three poetry collections, Floating, Brilliant Gone, Soft Science, and most recently, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. She is a Lilly/Rosenberg Fellow, a recipient of Princeton’s Holmes National Poetry Prize, and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program. She teaches at Bennington College and is a poetry editor at the Massachusetts Review. She is a founder of Brew & Forge.

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Maslen Ward: Your book begins with the titular poem, “The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On.” How did you begin to write this poem? When did you realize or decide you were writing a book?

Franny Choi: Thanks for that question. It’s true that this poem is kind of the basis for the rest of the collection and grounded the book as a whole. But the oldest poem in the book is “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History,” which I wrote sometime around 2015. Also, before I came to that poem, “The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On,”  the title poem, I’d had all of these pieces about Korean history, Korean War history, and thinking about the experience of diaspora from my family perspective as well. There was a period of time when I wasn’t sure how the kind of political and speculative work that I was doing related to the historical work that I was doing. It wasn’t until that poem, “The World Keeps Ending, and The World Goes On,” and this idea of the apocalypse that I started to connect those two.

The title poem was one that I came to around 2016 or 2017, after the mess of 2016, the election and the year leading up to it, as well as the build up of years of a sense of turmoil and crisis, of barreling toward the end of all things. It was in that moment that I looked around and started to have this sense of like, Oh, there is no way forward, we are just doomed. I couldn’t see anything except for the world in front of me. It was in a moment that my partner, Cameron Awkward-Rich, who is also a poet, gave me a piece of truth, which is that the apocalypse happened a long time ago, and that our people have long been surviving it.

It was a reorientation and a perspective that allowed me to understand that what I was looking at that seemed ahead of us was also in some ways behind us. And that just because I couldn’t see a path forward, didn’t mean that new and unimaginable possibilities wouldn’t unfold. That’s how I came to that poem, and how I started to connect the different things that I’d been writing about, which turned out were all the same thing actually.

MW: As it often does.

FC: Yeah.

MW: I want to ask you about the word apocalypse. In US culture, it’s become more common to talk about living in “apocalyptic times.” One thing, as you mentioned, that your book does is insist that the apocalypse has been happening for centuries and we’ve been surviving it for centuries, and one thing that poetry can do is take words that have been co-opted in popular culture, and re-instill meaning in them. For example, in two of the poems in your book, “Science Fiction Poetry” and “Demilitarized Zone,” you do this with the repetition of words “dystopia” and “demilitarized.” I’m curious what you hope the intervention of your book makes onto the word apocalypse, and how we use it today?

FC: I think it’s less of an intervention of my own and more of a looking back at the origins of the word. Something I learned pretty late in the process of writing the book (most of it had already been finished at this point) is that the word apocalypse originally doesn’t refer to just the end of everything, the end of the universe, but in fact, describes a genre of literature that reveals something major about the present. Usually by looking at the past, present, and future together in order to reveal something prophetic about the current moment.

When I read this, I was sort of amazed. Because in these moments of great catastrophe, amidst everything that is terrible about living through a major moment in history, or a major moment in one’s life, we experience a kind of clarity. And I think that these moments are a place where poetry, and the arts generally, could come in to harness that clarity, or to speak to that clarity. I think that is really what I’m after. I’m not saying that I think this book is a prophetic text or anything. But I think part of the work of artists is to be able to look around at the world and zoom all the way the fuck out and say, Okay, what is really happening here?

If I think about that as what it means to work in an apocalyptic poetics, that feels a little bit easier for me to hold onto than just describing the catastrophic end of everything.

MW: In your poem, “Poem With An End In Sight,” you ask, "Is this a hopeful poem / or a hopeless one?" A lot of this book seems to toe this line between hopefulness and hopelessness – that I’m sure resonates with a lot of its readers. Often when I think of hope, I think of Mariame Kaba’s saying, “Hope is a discipline.” What is the role of hope in your poetry and life?

FC: I love that quote by Mariame Kaba. I hold onto it. The reason it resonates with me so much is that it’s a very hard-won thing, if you can get to it, hope. Or if it’s not hard-won, then I don’t know if I would call it hope. Maybe I would call it something like optimism. What makes a hope a world-opening, powerful force is fighting to show up to it again and again, despite all the signs that things are hopeless. That, to me, is when hope actually matters. That, to me, is why it’s useful to think of hope as a discipline, because a real engagement with hope requires showing back up to the table again and again. Even when things aren’t going well.

One way I think about hope is as a craft practice. What does it mean to look around at the world, see how hopeless it all seems, and then to give oneself the challenge of finding the hope there, over and over again? Not in a way that is easy or trite or familiar, like “today’s a sunny day.” What does it mean actually to have that kind of hope that goes all the way deep down? How can you challenge yourself over and over again, to look for it? I think that is a craft practice.

The other way I think about hope, both in terms of my own life, as a person walking around in the world, and also as a poet, is that hope is not just a belief that everything will be okay. And it is not a belief that everything is doomed. It is the rejection of both of these, and instead, the willingness to believe that the future is actually unknown. And given that the future is unknown, that we can’t predict it, then there’s work to do. If it could go either way, then the things that we do actually matter. That is where hope comes from.

This is a concept that I was guided to by Rebecca Solnit’s book, Hope in the Dark, which I read alongside writing some of the early poems in this book. As a poet, engaging with hope is a practice of engaging with the unknown. Not to try to predict the ending of my poems, but to try to wade out into the weird, the doubts, the questions, the thorny places that are uncomfortable to go. And to look for the poem there.

MW: Thank you so much for sharing that. You mentioned you try not to predict the endings of your poems. What does this writing process look like for you?

FC: I have a tendency to draft when the veil is really thin. Late at night or in the middle of something when there’s a lot of distractions around me, when I’m not entirely in control of my own mind and process. There’s that Hemingway quote, “Write drunk, edit sober” – it’s not exactly like that for me, but in the spirit of that. My tendency is to draft late at night, then to come back to it in the morning and see what’s there. And to go from that mushy part of myself.

Interestingly for this book, the revision process was often not looking at the draft, then tinkering with it, and editing here and cutting a line or adding a line, it was more often the case that I started from the top, went through the whole poem again, and rewrote a completely new draft. I think that was partly because I wanted to preserve the music and the rhythm of the poems. And starting from the top and rewriting helps me do that. But I was also looking to hone an idea for each poem, that was one of the things I found myself getting stuck on. So I needed to go through the thought process again, in order to see where else it might lead me this time, to follow it in a slightly different direction and see where it took me.

MW: In an interview with Catapult, you spoke about how this was the book on which you worked the closest with an editor. You mentioned how your editor Jenny Xu at Ecco helped you think through not just the craft of the poems, but the political thinking you were trying to work out in this collection. How did that political thinking evolve over time? Did you have specific goals in mind as you were writing the poems?

FC: I couldn’t have started the book, or even most poems, with the intention to make a piece of political art, with a particular agenda rooted in the stakes of current political fights. If I’d gone in with such clear intention, when I already know all of the answers and I’m trying to just communicate them, there’s an element of mystery that is lost for me as a writer. But I had a set of political questions and a set of people and movements to whom I felt accountable in the process of answering those questions. At a certain point, when I started to understand what the overall shape and nature of the book was, the task was to try to figure out where the gaps were. What parts of the story are being elided? What do I need to write into?

For example, there was a particular point in the process of writing the book that I realized I couldn’t have a book that was about my experience as the child of immigrants, who are also settlers in North America, and write a book that was supposedly about the apocalypse without at least in some way addressing the fact that my people too are settlers on native land, on unceded land. And so that was where the poem “Who Died and Made You American" came from. That was one of the poems I wrote over and over again, trying to find the right poem.

I think that the real thing that I wanted as much help with as possible was thinking about what it meant to create a work of Asian American literature. A work that understood itself to be so, to be in conversation with Asian American movements and literatures, that also took the project of building solidarity with Black people and other people of color as seriously as I could, given the constraints of this particular creative project. So it was a set of responsibilities that I felt like I wanted to engage with seriously. Not like all this responsibility was put on me, but a responsibility that I chose to try to show up to.

In my early conversations with Jenny at Ecco, it was clear that she was going to be a really amazing thought partner, not just as a fantastic reader of poems, but also as somebody that I could trust to go into some of the thornier parts of these conversations with. I also relied on friends and other poets. Friends in Dark Noise and other friends who are poets of color, with whom I’ve built years of trust, and built up the language around a lot of these questions of accountability and solidarity. I had them in mind as I was writing.

I actually have in front of me a list of probably 100 names of people who I was trying to hold in mind as I was writing. Which is maybe too many people… But this came up because I was like, Okay, if I try to write a book and think about my audience as just Asian Americans, or even just people of color, or progressive people, or any of these things, I won’t end up writing my best poems, because I will be trying to create something that everybody would like. Or something that would be safe. I had run into this with previous work. I had just gotten in my head about it. So I asked myself, Who is it actually? Who are the actual people whose opinions about this book I really care about? I had to write down the literal names. Some of these people are not people who think of me... you know, some of them would be surprised that they were on this list. But it helped to keep me grounded. Who am I actually writing for?

MW: I love that you had an actual list of people written down on paper. A lot of people have different writing practices of sharing poems with friends when they are in progress, or not sharing until they feel like they’ve taken a poem as far as it can go. I’m definitely someone who’s always sharing poems and drafts and half-thoughts with everyone, and that’s a huge part of the way I write. In the acknowledgments of the book, but also throughout the poems, your friends are popping up, and I’m curious about the role of friendship in your actual writing practice. At what stage in your writing process do you share poems with friends?

FC: It depends on the poem. And it depends on the project. Cameron is my first reader on all things. It’s really lucky, I just married my favorite poet in the world. But the poets in Dark Noise particularly, we’ve all been writing together and sharing work with each other kind of intensely for about 10 years, which makes me feel incredibly old, but in a good way, I guess?

Especially in the earlier years of our being kind of a crew of friends, a family, whenever one of us was applying for an award or a fellowship, we’d all apply together, and share our applications with each other and give each other feedback, when we were all supposedly competing for one thing. We’ve all read each other’s books and listened to each other’s albums, in the case of Jamila. Dark Noise (and various folks) read iterations of this book as an overall draft, and also individual poems if it was something that I needed help on. Or sometimes I would just say, I would like for somebody to have read this, or I really liked this poem, would you guys want to read it? Sometimes there’s specific feedback that we’re looking for when we share work with each other, but there’s also just an ongoing ten-year dialogue that we have with each other. Sometimes it’s more structured and sometimes it’s just being together.

MW: I want to ask you about two exciting things you’ve also been up to while working on this book, The Witches and Warriors Retreat and Brew & Forge. How did working on both of those things inform your process and writing of this book?

FC: I think of my work with Brew and Forge as the other half of the work of this book. They’re sisters in some ways. Brew and Forge is a project that I started right around the time that I started writing the poems of this book in 2016. In the midst of the turmoil of the election, the panic, I asked myself, given that I’m suddenly in grad school and apart from my movement family for the first time in years – in the past that would be where my energy would go in a moment of political crisis – what do I, and the people around me, have access to in this moment? What could we push at to be the most helpful?

And the answer was that I could email a bunch of writers who had books and chapbooks, and we could sell them to raise money for a community organization that was doing grassroots work locally. To do the work both to respond to the crisis of the time and to build the world that would be there beyond this moment. That was how the Brew & Forge Book Fair was born. I basically emailed every writer I knew, and within a few weeks, we raised a little under $1,000 for Assata’s Daughters in Chicago. And then we just kept doing it.

We have started working with a crew of volunteers to put it together every year. We’ve raised around $25,000 for movement organizations, just by asking authors to sign and send their books to people who love books, who want to buy their books. It’s some of the work that I’ve done in my life that I’m honestly most proud of. To use literature, not just to inspire in these moments (which is what artists are often called to do, to inspire, soothe, et cetera, which is all important), but to support folks materially who are working on the ground.

After us doing this, I and other people around me started to ask, What has all of this been building toward? What have we actually been making here over the past five years? We came up with the idea to live up to some of the promise of what Brew and Forge had been, to build on the idea that artists and organizers together could make something meaningful, really meaningful happen. We started the Witches and Warriors Retreat, putting six poets and six organizers together at a retreat center for a long weekend, to share skills and dream together and also rest and be in joy in each other’s company. The first one happened last summer, and it was one of the most beautiful weekends of my life. So many things felt possible. There’s a dream of this book that I felt came true in front of my eyes when these folks gathered. That’s what I think of as the living embodiment of the dream for solidarity and the dream for a world that I haven’t yet seen, being birthed from the imagination of people who are using their brilliance everyday to make the world around them a little bit more just.

MW: What are you reading right now?

FC: Right now I am reading the book by Sarah Jaffe, Work Won’t Love You Back, which is giving me so much language and facts to so many feelings. I’m learning so much from this book. It’s so well researched. Also, I’m in the process of writing a collection of essays. The book is about robots, so I’m reading a lot about robots. I’m reading this book Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton by Long T. Bui. It’s blowing my mind. For poems, I just started reading Tawanda Mulalu’s Please make me pretty, I don’t want to die and Rio Cortez’s Golden Axe. I did a really bad job of keeping up with new poetry collections this year. I think I was just so in the state of trying to make my own exist. So I’m trying to catch up on new poetry from 2022.