Tell us about how poetry became a way of expression for you. How would you define your practice?

I think a lot about how expression is an act of ongoing translation. It’s an artificial and performative gesture that carries meaning from one person to another person. I am fascinated by how many factors and contexts have to be activated at the same time for meaning to carry and for a connection to be made. In some ways, I think the moment of understanding a poem is a miracle.

To me, poetry is the most truthful way for me to translate an interiority that I don’t know how else to bring out into a public space or into relations with people. It’s a practice that allows me to breathe naturally, despite and against the social conditions and rituals that I feel boxed into. In poetry, my language is as close as possible (depending on my abilities) to where my gut is, and in many ways, I see that place as where I am most wonderfully me. My poetry practice oscillates around the way I comfortably inhabit that interstitial interior space between the public and private and is always an attempt to ground that position in the space of a constructed poem.

Whenever I read boke and your other poems, I often find myself contemplating how specific expressions evoke images or emotions that I’ve only come across within the Korean language. How does your familiarity with Asian languages and your diverse cultural experiences shape your poetry, as well as the aesthetic it embodies?

I mentioned before that poetry is a grounding of me in between the public and private realm. For me, English is the language of the public realm and Mandarin is the language of my private self. I emote, think, feel, and unfold much of the time within the context and history of the Chinese language. That’s probably why I see poetry as a literal act of translation as well. How can I bring that distinct sensibility — grounded in language that is tied distinctly to a certain constellation of spaces, a sprawling history and culture that continues to evolve and expand contemporarily — into my practice as an English poet.

I love working with my hands because they remind me that to be a creative person is to engage with yourself at every possible level. From claymaking and papermaking, I get to explore histories and contexts that have ancient presences in Chinese culture. It allows me to consider culture in the context of a longer view, and follow the traces of concepts, ideas and forms that are shifting over time and through space. These explorations give me more experiences to ground and grow my language in. They also keep me humble. We run the risk as writers of remaining in an echo chamber when it comes to craft – not without reason of course. The more attention we give our craft, the more we are able to nurture and refine it.

However, I love a good shakeup to remind me that creativity by its own definition traverses and breaks boundaries. How can attention to the material, technical and bodied practice of craft in other mediums, expand my vocabulary and shape my sensibilities?

Since I am a poet, I look at language as both my material and my tool, so the more of it I have in abundance, the more choices I have to create. Crossing over into other genres has given me that much more perspective.

You’ve recently launched Teh People, an interdisciplinary production studio, and have been releasing projects like “Teh Talks” (which I’ve been thoroughly enjoying!). What were your intentions behind starting this studio, and what aspirations do you have for its future growth?

Teh People is my attempt at synthesis. In an age of professional compartmentalization, I find myself in tension with this idea that I have to label my skill sets separately to belong to different industry communities, or market my work in different ways. As much as I understand how it all “works”, there’s a stubborn streak in me that prefers to just do the thing as I like it, simply because it’s easier on my soul. Teh People in its current form is a soft pilot of this idea, where I identify simply as a producer – of art, events, conversations, programs, spaces etc. I do have a dream for it in a mature iteration, but I’m going to keep that information under wraps for now 😉

What are questions or themes you’ve been thinking about recently?

I tend to oscillate around proper nouns as entry points into linguistic explorations. boke was produced from the words, “rain”, “blue” and “walking”. A Carp Dreams Of The Milky Way was about “galaxy”, “language”, “myth” and “drowning”. The current manuscript I’m working right now is anchored to “black”, “yellow” and “grief”. But in many ways, these words don’t settle into fixed positions until after I’ve completed a first draft. I write through a series of images that expand or contract around these words, and collage them together. The piecing and stitching together process feels most natural to me, and I sometimes refer fondly to my writing process as “frankensteinian”.