choi's found interview
Each interview has been separated by a line and each Q is hyperlinked: ​​​​​​Q1 - Q5 are from the Incandescent Review; Q6 - Q7 are from the Southeast Review.
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Q1. Your poem “Quarantine” is about trying to break out of a larger system. How do you think your work in general aims to break out or come out of something greater?
That’s a really good question, and I think that it’s kind of an impossible question. I spent a good chunk of my life fighting against the system in ways big and small. I spent a few years working as a political organizer, doing police accountability and anti racial profiling work. I spent a lot of time reading books about liberation movements, and I think that right now, I feel like there are no ways to live fully liberated from the systems that govern us. I used to think of my poems as having to solve some political problem, and I don’t necessarily believe that anymore about my work. I think that my hope is to put people back in touch with momentarily feeling alive and feeling present. That’s the thing about capitalism––it takes us away from being present and feeling alive. I hope to try to build a world in my work that is, if not totally freed from the confines of the world, then at least can be a respite from it, or show a little shadow of the alternate world where we are able to live our fullest lives.
Q2. The mission of our magazine is to highlight teen writers, musicians, and artists because we believe that writing is a means for relieving stress and anxiety. How do you think your work with writing has helped you cope with current stressors?
I think that writing has always been a companion through the hardest times of my life. I think especially during the times when something sort of profoundly unexplainable has happened, then writing has helped me, if not explain it, then process it. Lately, I think that time is really weird. When times are really weird, writing semi-regularly has helped me keep track of time passing.
Q3. You mentioned that you write regularly. Do you suggest that poets write every day or in a consistent manner?
There’s a thing that happens during April, National Poetry Month, where people try to write every day, and I’ve done that a few times before, and I think that’s really great. The thing about creative writing is that there’s this common idea that we have to wait for when you’re inspired, but the skills for writing poetry are something you have to learn and practice. [NaPoWriMo] is really good practice, and it teaches you to look at the world like a poet. If you know you have to write a poem by the end of the day, then you spend your whole day looking around being like “Oh, could that be a poem?” and training yourself to look around at the world like that is really useful. It’s good to remember that you have to research before you write. I think of that period where you’re just listening to yourself, reading things, and looking at things around you––that’s a period of research. If you don’t give yourself that time to take in your life, you won’t write poems that are as good. That step is also important.
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Q4. Because the writing process is so individualized, it may seem quite difficult to teach writing. How do you go about doing that?
It’s actually not all that mysterious. There are exercises and, like I said, building muscles and skills as much as any other discipline. For me, the way to always do it is to show lots of poets’ writing in lots of different ways because you never know what is going to click for a particular student in the room. Also particularly, if you’re giving a lesson on syntax, you might show three different poets who are all using syntax in really cool ways but differently. I usually give people some sort of writing exercise; if we’re talking about syntax, write a poem that’s all one sentence from beginning to end. It’s a way of trying out what they see in poems. By being forced to write a little bit differently than you would normally be inclined to write, you learn how to write. A good way to get started is to read a poem or watch a video and then invent a writing prompt for yourself based on that poem.
Q5. To close, do you have any tips for young writers who are trying to explore their identity while navigating these current, stressful times?
That’s a really, really good question. I would say that anything that you feel right now is okay. And I would also say that it’s okay to lean into the contradiction. Our identities are always going to be a little bit more complicated as we live them than they might seem on paper, and it’s okay for those complications to remain complex.
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Q6. There is so much tenderness in your work, so much touch and intimacy even as the poems respond to problems of empire. Can you talk about the role of love/tenderness in your poetics? Perhaps how it appears in each collection or how it appears for you in your own relationship to writing and critique.
Since I was a baby-queer in movement spaces, I’ve been, for better or for worse, drawn to that quote by Che Guevara: “Let me say, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is driven by strong feelings of love.” This operates for me as something like an antidote, or maybe an emotional counterweight, to the ways that critique can drain me. It can be sort of a bummer to spend all of one’s professional hours describing, with as much rigor and precision as possible, the horrors of the world. Grounding myself in love—for my friends, for my imagined reader, for the disparate groups I claim as my people, for the creative process—helps me remember what it’s all for. Honestly, it helps me stay (at least a little) sane. And it helps me remember to keep care at the center; to never privilege an opportunity for critique over my responsibilities to the real and vulnerable human on the other side of the poem. I think this is part of the reason (though I may not have realized it at the time) that The World Keeps Ending is so musical: given how difficult and despairing the content can be at times, I wanted to privilege the pleasures of sound and meter, to create a sonics of care in the environments of the poems themselves, so that a reader might take some solace in the poems alongside the shittiness of their confrontations. As cynical as I can sometimes be in my suspicions about the valorization of tenderness, I also think it makes me a better thinker. Maybe other people do their best thinking from a defensive crouch, but I don’t. I have to let myself become a little soft in order to really get to the thing underneath the thing. I feel indebted to queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick and José Esteban Muñoz in doing this thinking: about what might be possible when we don’t take up a paranoid, defensive intellectual stance against the discourses and images intent on hurting us, but allow ourselves the grace of turning toward those with something like a reparative lens.
Q7. Do you have any superstitions or rituals around writing? Like you write between these hours, or you always wear overalls, etc.? If not, maybe some things that help you to start writing or help when you’re feeling stuck?
I try to surprise myself as much as possible when writing. For me, writing feels most like writing when it’s at least somewhat improvisational. I read recently that Gertrude Stein, while discussing automatic writing, called genius the ability to both write without thinking and, at the same time, watch oneself writing. I would certainly never feel comfortable using a word like “genius” to describe my writing(!), but I would say that writing feels most alive to me when I’m just as invested in discovering what emerges as I am in trying to faithfully convey something like truth, or inner experience—when I’m able to be attentive to both of these impulses at once. Things are going best when I can think about myself and the poem as being in collaboration, rather than me as The Author standing sovereign over the work or whatever. It’s weirdly hard to put myself in a condition in which I surprise myself—maybe I’m too much of a control freak about my output most of the time and spend too much energy wanting to seem smart or cool or deep! I have a few strategies I use for sneaking around that hyper-controlling, editor brain. Writing by hand is one (I have very messy handwriting). Writing when very sleepy or otherwise a little incapacitated is another, though the latter is not very sustainable. Using a received form also helps, because the rules give me something I’m forced to work around, even fight against. My favorite method of this sort is a kind of automatic writing (I guess I’m indebted to Stein after all, oh well), wherein I write nonstop without looking at what I’m writing, usually with some kind of loud sound playing in my headphones, music with lots of lyrics, or news headlines, or a recording of someone reading a poem. A few times, when I was feeling really stuck, I’ve typed in a Word document after changing the font color to white, so there’s no chance at all that I can look down and judge what I’ve written. Weird, but I swear it helps!