ON YOUR MOST RECENT BOOK, UNDERWORLD LIT, THE LA REVIEW OF BOOKS WRITES, “WHAT IS THE JUSTICE SYSTEM THAT COULD ADDRESS THE SHEER SCALE OF DEATH IN OUR MODERN ERA, ACHIEVED BY COLONIALISM AND RACIAL CAPITALISM? I DON’T THINK THAT UNDERWORLD LIT ASPIRES TO BE THAT TEXT, PERHAPS ULTIMATELY SUGGESTING THROUGH ITS INTERTEXTUALITY THAT ANY ONE BOOK WOULD BE INADEQUATE TO THAT IMMENSE TASK.” HOW DOES POETRY CREATE A UNIQUE SPACE TO EXPLORE “IMMENSE TASKS”?

One thing about poems is that, like the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, they're infinitely larger inside than they appear to be from the outside. You could say this about any book that contains a world, or worlds, between its covers. But a poem, because of the compression and intensification of language this art form entails, is uniquely suited to open magnitudes of meaning you might not expect when you look at the fourteen lines of, say, a sonnet on a page. So I think poetry is equipped to the "immense tasks" of imagining questions of justice, political systems, the problem of death on a mass scale, and many other concerns we've always faced as human beings throughout history. Those questions have always been explored by epic poetry across cultures; but they aren't the only questions, as the traditions of love poetry, philosophical poetry, and other forms of poetry show us every day.

UNDERWORLD LIT, OF COURSE, EXPLORES THE AFTERLIFE OF SEVERAL WORKS OF LITERATURE AND CULTURES — FROM COURTS OF THE QING DYNASTY TO THE AFTERLIFE OF DANTE’S INFERNO. WHAT DOES THE PROCESS OF RESEARCH LOOK LIKE FOR YOU?

For me, research is reading, in its many forms. It might be wandering through the stacks in the university's research library, pulling down books that weren't on my radar that I come across on the shelves. Or it may be diving into sites on the internet, another sort of labyrinth of knowledge and feeling that Jorge Luis Borges would have marveled at. It can take any number of forms, but something about finding my way through the writings of the dead struck me as a kind of journey through the underworld while I was writing this book. Of course that isn't the only way to research a book—reading can also feel exuberant, playful, or like a form of escape. But the melancholy of reading and research were very much on my mind, and in my heart, as I wrote Underworld Lit.

YOU INCORPORATE MANY VISUALS, FROM PHOTOGRAPHS TO DIAGRAMS, IN UNDERWORLD LIT. HOW AND WHEN DO YOU SELECT VISUALS FOR YOUR WORKS, AND IS THERE A COMMON OBJECTIVE YOU HAVE IN MIND WHEN DECIDING TO INCORPORATE A VISUAL ELEMENT INTO A PIECE?

The visual elements of this book mostly came about by accident; I'd be writing about something, like a Rorschach inkblot, and it would occur to me, why not include an image so the reader will experience what it's like to actually look at one of those things and see what they see for themselves in it? It became a way of testing the reader, to make the act of reading more interactive. Underworld Lit is a book about tests, and about being tested by experience and the by the world. My own illness felt to me like a sort of test as I was writing the book, so I wanted the reader to have the experience of being tested themselves. Somehow the images felt like a way of testing, and attesting to, the reality of what I was writing about—teaching, fatherhood, illness, and many other things. I also felt like images could be a way of testifying to the reality and urgency of the writers I was engaged with while writing the book—so I included images of those books themselves, rather than quoting them. It was a way of making myself and the reader see the documentary evidence of those books, their material form and textures, rather than just printed words on a page. So I guess the visuals in the book were a way of bringing the story closer to reality, whenever the unreality and otherworldliness of myth or art began to feel abstract or too dreamlike.

AS A CREATIVE WRITING PROFESSOR AT UCHICAGO, I’M SURE YOU’RE NO STRANGER TO HUMBLING AND INSIGHTFUL CONVERSATIONS WITH STUDENTS. WHAT IS ONE OF THE MOST SURPRISING THINGS YOU’VE LEARNED FROM YOUR STUDENTS OVER THE YEARS? WHAT, IN YOUR EYES, IS THE IMPORTANCE OF A CREATIVE WRITING EDUCATION?

I've learned so many things from my students, and I continue to learn from them every day—but one of the most surprising things I've learned from them is how anyone and everyone can make the most astonishing and timeless works of literary art. Language belongs to everyone, and it's so deeply embedded in our lives and our being that every person is already a poet without any need for training or intensive study. Of course training and intensive study can make you a better poet, but you're born into a stream of language that you shape in your own distinctive way in your mind and in your speech without even consciously or actively working at it. So you can write poetry if you simply trust the weird ways that language moves through you and inhabits you. That's the hard part, actually. When students write poems they often want to sound "poetic" with some sort of grand literary tradition in mind. But the most exciting work happens when they set aside those lofty models and explore what makes language unique when it's filtered through their own bodies and minds and experience.

THROUGHOUT YOUR NOVELS AND WORKS, YOU EMPLOY A VARIETY OF POETIC FORMS, OFTEN BALANCING POSTMODERN AND MODERN STYLES. HOW DO YOU STRIKE AN IDEAL BALANCE BETWEEN POETIC FORMS? DOES SUCH A BALANCE EXIST?

Some poets I love write in one form for their whole lives. I think of Basho's haiku, Emily Dickinson's quatrains, or any number of other poets in this vein. Other poets can't sit still within a form, and restlessly move from one form or genre or style to another. T.S. Eliot seems like a good example of this kind of poet--The Waste Land and Four Quartets look and sound very different, but they come from the same literary intelligence. I guess I fall into the second category of writers, who try out different forms and approaches as a way of expressing the multifaceted dimensions of whatever it is that concerns them. Often you don't know what your 'subject' is as a writer until after you've written a book, or after you've written many books. But you can find your way toward your subject by experimenting with different forms and genres and styles. Or you can discover new subjects by trying out a new form, too. For me, that's what keeps writing alive and interesting. Other writers do this by deepening their engagement with a single form or style, like Gertrude Stein's lifetime of writing about everything from war to race to sexuality within a single experiment in literary style. I think you figure out what kind of writer, and what kind of person, you are as you develop a sense of yourself as an artist who works in many forms or in one form.

FINALLY, DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR YOUNG BIPOC WRITERS LOOKING TO INITIATE WRITING JOURNEYS OF THEIR OWN?

I think it's important for every writer, and young BIPOC writers especially, to immerse themselves in literary art by writers from backgrounds different from their own. That may mean writers from different cultures, different historical eras, or different orientations of identity and belief. We're often encouraged to write about our own experience, and that's wonderful and deeply important. But one way of enlarging our own sense of experience's horizons is to read work by people different from us—and the more different from us they are, the more exciting and challenging that work may be. It can be incredibly exciting to read a book that confirms our own experiences; I felt that way when I first read Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories about South Asians in the United States. It can also transform us to read a book that introduces us to new experiences by people whose lives look very different, or even threatening, to us. So I think that would be my advice to young BIPOC writers trying to find their way—read outside the box!