Thank you both so much.
You both read really beautiful, long poems, and Tiana, you
talked a little bit about why you wanted to write that.
But how, for each of you, did you keep your attention
going through the writing and successfully get
all the way through to the end of a long poem?
Do you want to answer?
[INAUDIBLE]
You go first.
[CHUCKLES]
It's hard.
One of my friends told me that poetry
is the organization of breath.
And so, in a long poem, it's like,
how do you sustain that breath for a long length of time?
How do you keep that momentum going?
How do you keep that engine going?
We're so used to the economy of words or thinking
that a poem needs to be on one page.
And I guess, for me, especially after my first book came out,
these long poems just kept barreling out of me.
And like I talked about in my workshop the other night,
there's so many poetry rules that we feel like we have,
and we don't even know why we have them.
And I was really interested in breaking those rules
and pushing for length.
And so for me, I kind of had this obsessive quality
to chase that breathlessness, to chase this borderlessness.
It just felt like an intuition that I couldn't quite escape.
And it felt for me--
I mean, poetry is a really somatic experience for me--
I just literally felt like something
was tumbling out of me.
I think Ruth Stone said when she felt a poem coming,
she heard rumbling down the hill,
and she tried to catch the hem of it.
And so with a long poem, you're just chasing that hem.
And the thread never stopped.
And so very much--
if you can tell, I talk very fast, I write very fast.
[LAUGHTER]
And this is just how I work.
And so really, more than anything,
I'm trying to give myself permission
to be myself on the page.
And instead of pushing myself back,
I was actually giving my permission like,
no, keep going.
Don't stop.
Get it.
Chase it.
And it's really until I fully exhausted myself,
where I was like, I think I've exhausted
every single arena here.
And you hear it in that poem.
And they're actually separated by dinkuses--
I know it's a fun word-- but those three asterisks
where it was like turning a diamond on its facet.
And it's just like I had turned the diamond 360 until I felt
like I'd got to this place.
And when you end with Lorca the duende there's
nowhere to go after that.
[LAUGHTER]
And so it just kind of felt like this gymnastics type landing
where I was just like, yes, OK, it's done.
And then, the hard work is revision, of course.
But for me, sometimes it's really great
when you can have those arrival points when the poem tells you
when it needs to end.
But for the long poem, I think it's very obvious
when it needs to end.
You're out of breath.
I love what you say about breathlessness.
That is incredible.
Yeah, I think because I write out of silence,
I'm staying with the poem for a very long time.
"Tuol Sleng" was originally published
in my chapbook, Year Zero.
And it was just two sections.
And then I kept on thinking about what I really
wanted to say about that place.
If I'm calling a poem "Tuol Sleng,"
then I really need to talk about every single aspect of how
it haunts me, my experiences there,
when I'm thinking about that space as a museum, thinking
about the tourist experience and as my own experience
being a daughter of genocide survivors,
being a person of diaspora.
I had to think a lot about these different moving
parts in the poem.
And I just spent a very long time thinking, just thinking.
And it's funny because all my teachers say, don't think,
[LAUGHS] which brings me now to where I'm
at in my writing process today.
I had been given this prompt by Louise Gluck to write a journal
simulation.
So she said, follow a thought over seven days,
and just write little sections, short things.
And I did that.
And now I'm starting to see how I
don't need to think when I put down words on the page,
how liberating that feels to just let yourself go.
And I think that kind of ties back
into the sort of breathlessness that Tiana was talking about.
For me, it's just let me follow a thought
and just keep on following that image and circle back to it
sometimes.
See where repetition is working to sustain the poem
and how imagery changes.
I think that's really valuable.
How does a narrative change?
Because if you have a long poem, you have to sustain it.
And then you have to make sure something is evolving
throughout the entire poem.
Any other question?
Yeah, yeah.
Both of you mentioned that teachers of yours,
or professors or whatever, have told you something,
and you defied it, and you continue to defy it.
And how strong is that tension when it happens?
About defiance?
Or I mean, tension defiance.
What do you mean with the end of your question?
Just what does it mean to defy them?
What do you mean by the tension?
The tension within you as a writer, as a poet.
What happens?
So your teacher says, don't publish that poem,
and you go ahead and you did it.
Yeah.
I think, for me, so often, we're taught
of what does it mean to be a good student and obey.
And growing up in church, I was told a lot of things to obey.
And I grew up in a very regimented way.
And it wasn't until I started questioning those things--
and I think the poem is a container
for those unanswerable questions to wrestle and toggle
with them.
And I don't really like being told what to do.
And so honestly, for me, it was guidance.
When my teacher told me that--
and it was why she told me that.
Because she said it made her feel uncomfortable.
And I was like, exactly.
I wanted you to feel uncomfortable,
as if being uncomfortable was a product that I wouldn't want
from my poem or that a poem has to make you feel appeased
or that I'm here.
And so that actually helped me define my poetics.
It helped me define what I was pushing back against.
So she was actually helping me define the wall
that I felt the pressure on that I didn't know how to define.
She gave me the lexicon for that.
And so for me, it gave me that definition and that push,
where normally, in the past, I would
have cowered to that type of pressure,
that type of authority figure.
And of course, you should respect your elders and things
like that.
But I think there's just a time and place.
And I think the graduate school is a time
to reckon and wrestle with authority and the canon
and to ask questions.
I think, for me as a professor now,
I try to decenter authority myself.
I don't really like that approach
that I'm in the room as an expert.
I don't like looking at poetry as a code to crack
or that I'm an expert that has the secret answer,
and you guys all have to guess what it is.
For me, I like approaching art that we're
all students together, and we're learning and interpreting this
together in a community.
And so for me, it actually not only defined my poetics
but defined my pedagogical approach, as well.
I think my relationship to defiance
started at a very young age.
So it's not necessarily something--
I don't know if I will answer the question regarding
my teachers.
I like breaking rules, too.
But I think in the context of my work,
the history that I had been writing about,
I thought that by writing about history,
I thought I could change what happened and realized,
through a lot of drafts and heartbreaks in those drafts,
I couldn't.
I couldn't change anything.
So there's a lot that I had to address
that I couldn't reverse.
But I wanted to defy something.
I wanted to defy these power structures that
made my people, my community, my family,
vulnerable in this world.
So when I read "The Death of Henry Kissinger,"
he said that quote, in President Nixon's words.
"It's an order.
It's to be done--
anything that flies or anything that moves."
When people say these things when they have power,
they're not thinking about human lives at all.
So what do I say, as a daughter of genocide survivors?
I get to defy what has been spoken.
I get to do that through language.
And I'm also thinking a lot about how sometimes, I
write poems because I disagree with something, because I
am made uncomfortable.
And I want to defy just power that I maybe don't have.
But then I end up empowering myself and other people
and those who are identifying with my narrative, Cambodian
or not-- anybody in this world who has
been subject to US imperialism.
So for me, that's really important.
But also, I think I'm also moving away
from defiance and into desire.
And that's something that I didn't know I could have.
I didn't know I could actually feed into my own desire.
Because when your history is reduced or erased
or marginalized, you don't know that you can desire anything.
So now, in that way, I think desire can also
be a form of defiance.
And I think it's informed by one's history,
your relationship to defiance.
Everybody has that.
But I really think it's informed by my history
and what I want now.
I'm just wondering how you came to poetry to begin with,
as a child or young adult or how that happened?
Yeah, I found an old art project in my mom's house
where it was like you had to make a timeline of your life
or something in fourth grade, which is kind of funny.
And I put a tick mark.
It was like, age nine, became poet.
It's like, oh, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
But the real answer is I had just an amazing teacher
in high school.
His name is Bill Brown.
He was kind of a poet of the Beat Generation.
And I felt so lucky.
And so many schools don't have these creative writing programs
anymore.
And so for the last two years of high school,
I would spend an hour with him every day.
He would always start the class with a contemporary poet.
He was the first person that read Li-Young Lee
to me and Sharon Olds.
And I was like, whoa, what is this thing?
This is like some magical--
it wasn't Chaucer, and it wasn't all this stuff
that I had been used to.
It kind of lit me within.
When you're a teenager with lots of angst and like Daria,
and you don't know how to contain your emotions,
and you hear Sharon Olds for the first time,
that feels very exciting.
It feels very liberating.
Like, whoa, there's this container
where I can have this deluge of feelings.
And he would always have a metronome in the class.
And we would always write to that click.
And so I still feel like I'm writing
to that click in my life.
I came to poetry not when I was young.
I came to poetry when I was 19, and I was in college.
I didn't even know that poetry was something
that I could even access.
But I was studying in Washington, DC.
I thought I wanted to be a foreign service officer.
I loved learning languages.
I thought I was going to travel, work for the government-- ha
ha.
[LAUGHS] Of course, that's not going to happen.
But I studied international studies.
I really wanted to access the world in a way
that I couldn't when I was living
in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
But as I was studying the histories of other countries
and all the stuff, I didn't see anything
about my country, Cambodia.
I didn't see anything, even when we
talked about the Vietnam War.
So I was, like, hey, cool, there's
a course called US, China, and Japan.
What about other countries in Asia?
I didn't see myself anywhere.
And I didn't see myself going--
I didn't see myself reflected in TV, books,
anything in Pennsylvania.
Toni Morrison said if there's a book that you want to read
but that you haven't read yet, then
you need to be the one to write it.
And I think that was a really big green light for me.
But I came to poetry, I think, just because I was
curious about my own history.
And I committed to my craft when I studied in Vietnam.
Because I was close enough to that history
in a different way, where I had to look at myself
and my own privilege as an American,
as a person of diaspora, but also
as a daughter of former refugees who was, in that context,
that had so many questions.
So I think I became a poet because I
had a lot of questions.
I also thought that writing poetry,
I thought I couldn't call myself a poet until I knew
what love was, which is funny.
Because now, it's like, oh, no.
You can call yourself a poet any time, really.
But I think we all come into this world with a lot
of heartbreak already.
And that was very apparent for me,
growing up as a kid who had to navigate
my parents' PTSD and familial silence and everything.
So I just had a lot of questions.
And I think that those questions naturally led into poetry.
So why don't end there on questions.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
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