Dissecting Personal History as a Means to Shape Poetry

KARAN

Jenny, these poems are dazzling — lyrical, cerebral, deeply felt, and formally ambitious. They unfold like inquiries, and what’s being inquired keeps shifting: history, grief, obedience, animal instinct. I want to begin with “Girl / Guāi 乖,” which moves like a spell or a script dismantling itself. You write: “乖 I was praised only / when I did something I did not want to. / Obedience is to bury yourself.” There’s so much power and danger in that final line. What does obedience mean to you now — as a poet, as a daughter, as someone writing back through silence?

JENNY

Karan, thank you for your thoughtful questions. I love your description of this poem as a script dismantling itself, because I suppose I might say I’m in an era of dismantling — discarding goals that were never truly mine, unlearning survival strategies that no longer serve me. I think people can mistake obedience for care, supposing that an obedient child must be obedient out of love for their parents and community. But I think obedience is actually a response to fear, and unquestioning obedience is corrosive to the self and society. By writing, resisting silence, learning to live according to my values, I might be disobedient, but I think disobedience can actually be a greater act of love.

KARAN

I also love how these poems carry grief and intellect in tandem — moving between origin and aftermath, mother and daughter, horn and ash. The language is clinical, lyrical, and philosophical. The forms expand like memory under pressure: fragmented, triptych, echoic. Do you have a writing routine, Jenny? And what does your process actually look like — emotionally, spatially, spiritually? Do you begin with a phrase, an image, a memory? And most importantly, why poetry?

JENNY

I wish I could say that I have such a thing. Sometimes I’ll do a 30-day challenge, or I’ll go off to a writing residency and have a very disciplined and structured writing routine for exactly that period and no longer. I’m learning to meet my brain where it is and not feel bad resting in between intensive creative bursts. That said, prose requires more consistency, so I’m just trying to touch my WIPs most days.

Poems often come to me after I’ve been ruminating on a phrase for some time. The memories and images were hanging around too, but I think the persistent phrase is what most consistently precipitates a poem for me. As for why poetry, I’ve often said that I was initially drawn to the emotional immediacy of it. Even if you haven’t logic-ed your way somewhere yet, in poems you can feel your way toward clarity. And I also enjoy thinking about and puzzling through language in a sort of obsessive way that is suited to poetry.

KARAN

“Cockroach” is such a livewire poem — political and funny and rage-filled and genre-bending. You write: “Maybe if Kafka had been a woman / he would have turned / into a bee / and flown / far / away.” There’s a tonal pivot in that stanza — from scorched to surreal, from anger to escape. How do you think about tonal movement in your poems? Do you ever write toward rupture?

JENNY

Maybe the only thing to write toward is rupture? I wrote “Cockroach” — actually, I think all of these poems — after doing a flash creative nonfiction workshop with Annie Liontas, and it ruptured something in me, in the best way. The poems I was writing afterward felt freer, like I was finally able to let the self-editor take a much-needed nap and let my brain free-associate onto the page. So I wouldn’t say that I consciously consider tonal movement while writing, but I’m trying to avoid erecting barriers against movement, tonal or otherwise.

KARAN

I keep thinking about “Origin Story: Triptych.” It builds a whole theory of inheritance through grief and language and time. In the first section, you write: “In other words the past is a kind / of infancy.” In the last: “Is it okay to replace the dead with living?” You have a PhD in biomedical science which is so cool. How does the science part of you shape the spiritual, mythic, or elegiac part of your poetics?

JENNY

Writers always think it’s cool I am/was a scientist, but often not the other way around, which I find interesting. I think as a scientist, I was trained to be very methodical, to zoom out to see the big picture and make connections between different natural phenomena. Every little protein is just one node in a pathway, each reaction one event in a giant chain of events, and doesn’t this chain of events look a lot like the inverse of this other one? Maybe that helps imbue events with a sort of intrinsically mythic quality. Like, look how X thing was shaped by all this other stuff that happened before, and isn’t it kind of cool to observe the shaping? But as a deeply emotional thwarted idealist, let me also catastrophize and elegize the inevitable tragedy like a profane Cassandra.

KARAN

“A Way to Look Away” is such a complex, cinematic poem. It weaves migration, gendered sacrifice, the American dream, and the blindness of assimilation. The formal fluidity of the poem — the way it tunnels forward like a train or a fever dream — is mesmerizing. Do you think of form as an extension of theme? Or does it emerge more intuitively as you write?

JENNY

Thank you. I think it’s a bit of both. I’ve been much more intentionally playing around with form in my current manuscript. Sometimes form does emerge intuitively as I write — this particular poem was one that always had a similar tunneling shape that just felt appropriate — but lately, my process of revision often involves drastically changing the form (going from a justified prose poem block to couplets, for example) and seeing how that fits.

KARAN

I found “Ovine Triptych” devastating and brilliant — the metaphor of horns as adaptation, as inheritance, as both weapon and cage, is unforgettable. You write: “There’s a disease where bone grows in the place of the slightest injury. / Over time the bone hardens into a cage.” How do you think about metaphors of the body in your writing — especially when it comes to grief, gender, or survival?

JENNY

Once during grad school, I was running through the park and tripped on a root. I ripped up my leggings beyond repair, and my knee was a bloody painful mess. I’d just seen someone present a paper on wound healing, so watching this process after learning about it in depth was fascinating. Each day, the wound looked completely different, going from that bloody mess to a patch of shining new pink skin within a couple days. Soon, it was like nothing had happened, except I’d fallen so hard that to this day, that one knee hurts a bit more if I kneel on hardwood or squat too low. Turns out the body is incredibly resilient, but the body also keeps the score. In my current work, I’m thinking a lot about the traumatized body, the politicized body, the body as both dehumanized flesh sack and container of impossible multiplicity.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: There’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And are you headed in a different direction?

JENNY

It probably varies by poem, but heart feels more apt for my earlier work, which was largely written out of grief and unsettled youth. Mind feels a little truer for my current work, and maybe I’m inching towards soul.

KARAN

Your first book won the Steel Toe Books Award, you hold a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology, and your writing appears across genres and platforms. What advice would you give to emerging writers trying to navigate both literary ambition and emotional urgency?

JENNY

A poem can change your life, but poetry is so unserious. Something I like to ask is, why do you write? What would it take for you to be happy (with your writing)? Write down your answer, pin it somewhere, and read it if/when you catch yourself changing the goalposts.  

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt to help them begin a new poem?

JENNY

I love persona poems, and Margaret Atwood’s “Pig Song” and Jennifer Huang’s “song of chou doufu” are particularly delightful to me because they speak from the voices of things commonly viewed with disgust or loathing (a pig and stinky tofu, respectively). I find these emotions to be interesting, because we often feel them towards something we don’t understand, something we fear, and/or something we dislike in ourselves. Read these poems, and make a list of 3-5 things you or most people feel disgust towards (~5 min). Pick one, and write a poem in the voice of this hated thing (~15 min). Afterward, reflect: is there any change in your attitude toward this thing?

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art (not a poem) that you keep returning to — a painting, a film, a sculpture, a recipe, anything — that haunts or sustains you.

JENNY

I often think about the 2015 indie film Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an absurd concept on paper, based on an urban legend that a Japanese woman became obsessed with finding the treasure buried in the movie Fargo, which was in turn based on a more banally sad true story of grief and despair. Taking this film at face value, it’s beautifully shot, and it’s sort of like a modern-day Don Quixote with an Asian woman in the titular role, speaking to the crushing impossibility of fulfillment for someone, especially a woman, who does not fully conform within a rigid society. This is the part that haunts me, but the part that sustains me is the reimagining of possibility.

KARAN

And of course, because we believe in studying the master’s masters: which poets have most influenced your work?

JENNY

Mind-numbingly impossible to list them all, but the first poem I remember reading in English was William Blake’s “The Tyger,” and nine-year-old me thought it was so cool, almost as cool as Tupac, who was probably my actual first exposure to English-language poetry. (I still count Tupac as a poet, and I still think both are cool.)

Later on, my college professor Mark Jarman really shaped my relationship with poetry. Some doctor or scientist-poets who gave me permission to exist or made me feel less alone include David Watts, C. Dale Young, Lucille Lang Day, Angelo Mao, and Grace. H. Zhou. I’ve been inspired by many (additional) Asian American poets, such as Paisley Rekdal (have thought about “A Story About Power” for months, and did you know about the interactive companion website for West?), Victoria Chang (Obit lives on my desk, and wow her masterful associative leaps), Brandon Shimoda (Hydra Medusa expanded the possibilities of a poetry book for me), Wendy Chen (her Li Qingzhao translations have made me think hard about translation, memory, and gender), Monica Youn (From From), and Eugenia Leigh (Bianca), to name just a few. Rose McLarney’s “Gather” helped get me through grad school. Natasha Tretheway, Marie Howe, Robert Hass, Tiana Clark, Ada Limón, Natalie Diaz, Ross Gay, Matthew Zapruder, and Andrea Gibson also wrote poems that blew my mind and changed me before I ever identified as a poet or writer. The last poetry book I was reading was Forrest Gander’s Mojave Ghost, which is particularly resonant to me now as a fellow child of the Mojave writing about that hardscrabble desert upbringing.

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