HOW DID YOU COME TO POETRY?
Before I came to poetry, I had an unusual disdain for its lack of structure. It wasn’t until I came to familiarize myself with the kindness of its freedom- its thrilling, destabilizing freedom that I began seriously indulging myself in the form. Poetry allowed my language its inherent provisionality, uncertainty, and slippages. The elusive, quicksilver, provisional nature of language is, by necessity, suppressed in ordinary conversation and poetry’s intuitive, non-reductive nature remains a way to both confront and return to myself with every line break.
HOW HAS YOUR RACIAL AND CULTURAL IDENTITY IMPACTED YOUR WRITING JOURNEY?
My racial and cultural identity influences and permeates my writing and poetry, serving as a repository of my cumulative experiences. As a young Asian immigrant living in an unprecedented time of social unrest and uproar, there is a constant urgency to explore how different identities contrast and to thread similarities within that intersection. Since poetry is focused on relaying experience in a highly salient way, there is great potential for it to be utilized as a means to build empathy and bridge gaps of understanding between people who come from differing backgrounds.
WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF WRITING ADVICE YOU’VE EVER RECEIVED?
You are infinitely more than the words and sentences you cannot write. Oftentimes, as writers, we ruminate on the things we have failed to express in our work- experiences too heavy, emotions too visceral, stories too much for us in that moment. We are artists in our own right and we shouldn’t have to traumatize ourself to produce it.
the tongue wants what it wants, unbound
By Julia Zhu
the gods speak of me in whispers
say I am selfish
insatiable
because I cannot
hold this unfettered
tongue (it is a dangerous thing / child / to be this loud)
I offer a temperate oath: before I (refrain / from speaking / like a good Asian daughter / who doesn’t)
light your votives in groveling prayer,
before I (want too much / of what you can’t / or rather / shouldn’t)
believe you you will hear
(nevermind / put down your pen / be / loved)
a song in two octaves
lower than (your need to be / loved / so self-indulgent)
how it was meant to be sung
from a distance (i have given you nothing / to cry about)
the rhoptron bellows and bellows and thunders and
time (will tell you / to stop / writing)
to sink into the sanctity
of soil, my last (time to stop)
drink of wine
from our kylix
my mouth, unbaptized
Gaea does not scorn me.
She peels away darkness, leaves
only softness for my daughter
for her daughter no longer
at war, I am someplace
that loves me back
She cleaves her hemispheres, presses another earth into me, the sky
weightless, she brings forth
a pen, a lost line
of good (—in silence / you will be this way too)
Asian daughters, voices no longer hollowed
feet unbound (to bring shame / humor us)
tongues refraining for nothing (—not even this war / is freedom)
light, for nothing else
is so (wasted / nothing else so dishonorable / nothing else so reprehensible
for not even your grandmother / can speak
what you write) unfettered, I exhale
tell me I am not who they say I am
and so she speaks to me
(with the tenderness of which
she harbors her dwellers)
I should indeed be selfish
insatiable
for dead poets don’t speak
in tongues, but in teeth.