Interview: Derek Chan
Last December, I had the opportunity to interview Derek Chan—a fellow Cornell MFA student and poet—for the EPOCH blog. Over emails, we discussed Chan’s poetry, thoughts on lineage, the politics of bearing witness, and poetic language’s ability to hold space for the unsayable and untranslatable.
Derek Chan is a writer and educator from Melbourne, Australia. He holds a First-Class Honours in Literary Studies from Monash University, where he received the Arthur Brown Thesis prize. His work has appeared in journals and anthologies both domestically (Best of Australian Poems, Australian Poetry Anthology, Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Voiceworks, Verge) and internationally (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, The Margins, Juked). He is the recipient of the 2023 Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, and has been a finalist for awards from Frontier Poetry and Palette Poetry. His website is https://www.derekchanarts.com/.
NP: You wrote “Zuihitsu” after Jenny Xie and “Notes on the After” after Ada Limón. When you read a poem, what compels you to write one in response?
DC: Likely, there are too many reasons than I am aware of. It could begin with an arresting turn of phrase or a resonant image I seek to inhabit, excavate, or dilate further; a moment which compels me towards the impossible task of finding language for what lacks language. It could begin with the trace of a song; some enduring architecture of sound which compels me to wander through its many shimmering colonnades and discover where it is that I want to go, why I am compelled to leave at all. As Jericho Brown would say, “I do not believe that poems are made of our beliefs. Instead, I believe poems lead us to and tell us what we really believe.” There too might be a call and response element: what other ghostly versions of this poem lie in palimpsest beneath this poem? What other possible worlds could I offer this poem to? What is the voice within this poem that has awakened some estranged voice within my own, and what chorus wants to be sung? To quote Czesław Miłosz, “In the very essence of poetry…a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us.”
Perhaps more pragmatically, some poems offer a blueprint for nascent ideas and modes of inquiries that would have otherwise remained inchoate. This was the case in a poem like “Zuihitsu”—a poem which takes its title after the classical Japanese form of the same name, and which can be loosely translated “to follow the brush.” Seeing Jenny Xie’s rendition of the Zuihitsu, particularly her treatment of the form’s liminal roamings—blurring the line between prose and poetry, interior and exterior landscapes, fragmentation and precision, tenor and voice, transience and reflection—allowed me to understand the possibilities of the Zuihitsu as a form of migrant poetics which could robustly support my preoccupations and explorations into the fraught, vacillating diasporic subjectivity.
NP: Speaking of language: “A Letter from the Bottom of a Well” contains quotes in Chinese. “My mother speaks to me in a poem and says” blurs the boundary between languages further, asking “so what difference really / between ngór (mine/my) / & gnaw / between son (ér) / & hunger (è).” What kind of effect in your poems do you think Chinese evokes that an English equivalent can’t? As a multilingual poet, do you think poetry (over other genres) is more open to the untranslatable?
DC: The use of code-switching and multilingualism serves and evokes different poetic effects depending on the work at hand. In a poem like “A Letter from the Bottom of a Well,” which can be conceptualized as an address from the dead to the living—a reverse apostrophe of sorts—the use of Mandarin served a clear affective role in shaping and invoking the lyric persona in ways that English alone would have been unable to. It is undeniable that Chinese carries a unique affective charge, even for a reader who might not be able to understand its intricacies. For instance, a word like hunger (è), is an utterance that is so embodied, so visceral, so primary, that it almost feels like we are speaking the very first language of our body’s desire again. Likewise, the ideogrammatic shapes and radicals themselves are also deeply poignant; a word like return (回)—as in “Mother, I will return home soon”—contains a mouth (口) within a mouth. Again, such incredible desire and intensity. The resonances of Mandarin therefore became an essential spell and song to incantate and stir up an “I” which could sing from the ruptures of history and echo across the watery dream of timelessness, yet with the privacy and intimacy of a son handing his tired mother a glass of warm jasmine.
Myung Mi Kim. Photo by Norma Cole.
The use of Chinese in a poem like “My mother speaks to me in a poem and says,” was not only interested in what Chinese can evoke as opposed to its English equivalent, but also in what is evoked—rather than lost—by writing in the very untranslatable interstices and liminal spaces between both languages and cultures. In particular, I am thinking of Homi Bhaba’s notion of a “Third Space”—the re-formulation of a third linguistic mode through the dialogic interactions between languages. The linguistic embeddedness and inter-changeability of Mandarin, Cantonese, and English blurs the traditional boundaries of where one language ends and the other begins. In true spirit of the “Third Space,” neither language system is placed under risk of displacement by their mutual co-existence. Rather, the traces of both languages are still preserved, and their differences are acknowledged and constructed into connective tissue without an assumed hierarchy, challenging the notion that languages conform to a fixed set of rules and closed cultural meanings, and instead emphasizing that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. By code-switching between English and Chinese, it becomes possible to evoke what Myung Mi Kim calls “the spectral, the remaindered, the asymmetrical, and the incommensurable in traversing language and cultures,” as a means to replace the violence of a categorical, “pure” cultural presence with the fluid, hybrid, and interstitial; values of the “Third Space.”
I certainly do believe that poetry is distinctive in its ability to honor, traffic, and hold the inarticulable, the untranslatable. As a form, poetry possesses many unique properties that illuminate and contour the inexplicable, asymptotic chasms which lie between language, experience, and the actual: the capacity for surprising, accelerative leaps in affect and thought; oscillating tensions between the line level and the sentence level; flickers of half-meanings in the hesitations of enjambments; destabilizing deployments of syntax; a dissolution of hierarchies and the subsequent kinetic possibilities of compressing together starkly differing modes and registers of language, etc. The poem to me is perpetually fraught and shot through with seams of unfinished bewilderment. This is perhaps why, as multilingual poet, I find the poem as such a fertile and natural space to traverse the incommensurable distances between languages and cultures. I have an entrustment, that in the poem, the untranslatable, liminal collisions between languages are not failures, but unaccountable—and therefore inexhaustibly mysterious—enunciations in their own right, serving as generative reconfigurations of legibility, intelligibility, and sense-making. Lastly, not only is poetry open to the untranslatable, but I would argue that it even distinctively champions it as an ethics—the “right to opacity,” as Glissant would say. As with its affinities to linguistic hybridity, the poem urges us to continually blur the limits and demarcations of the self, to “consent not to be a single being.”
NP: In terms of influences–I can’t help but notice the resonances of Solmaz Sharif and Layli Long Soldier (among others) especially in some of your more explicitly political work. “[Immigration Interview: Chinese Exclusion Act 1882]” for example appropriates bureaucratic language. How do you go about transforming language that has been (and is) used to harm and oppress? What are the challenges of working with this kind of material?
DC: These are such generous, astute, and kind observations—thank you! There are so many ways to go about transforming the violence of state-sponsored language, but as with all poetry, I think it must begin with the human voice. Here, I would like to begin by invoking Sharif: “The lyric self is the political weapon I have as a poet. My subjectivity is maybe the most potent force I have in interacting politically on the page.”
The calcified state-sponsored language enforces coercion and abuses its powers through passive voice, euphemisms, false equivocations, parallel constructions, etc. So, to properly interrogate the ways in which violence against bodies begins as violence in language, there must firstly be a closing of distances, an enactment of proximity. We must confront the gaps between language and body; the formal methods by which the two have been cleaved and estranged from each other, in order to justify violence upon the latter. Here, I agree that the lyric self—or more broadly, the quality of lyricism—is uniquely situated to this task. If I understand lyricism and the lyric self to be the song of interiority—and here I refer to interiority as a general quality, a state of being, rather than something which is strictly confined to a certain personhood—then to write with the lyric self is to enact proximity, to embody language back into intimacy and flesh.
As we know, the word “lyric” etymologically traces back to “of the lyre.” And like the raptures of song, lyric poetry is about stirring and provoking the calcifications of everyday language, experience, and thought. Pure song cannot be subject to coercion, as it is about imaginative liberation, deep emotional experience. In a lyric poem, our relationships to emptied-out language can change and become awakened. If the state is preoccupied with weaponizing language into something akin to a long-range missile—in which the immensity of distance between a trigger pulled in an air-conditioned room and the resulting human casualty ensures a terrifying ease of continued obliteration—then the interiority of the lyric poem is concerned with collapsing such distances—between the living and the dead, between us and them, here and there, applause and gunfire.
Rage, desire, grief, fear, joy: these are but some of the transformative lyric forces which can crack open the sediments of legalese; which might make audible the inaudible; which may resurrect erased personhoods back from the murky depths of doublespeak to act as recompense, retaliation, remonstration against the silences and violence of history and deceptive language. Because ultimately, to cite Sharif again, “how else is power is challenged and enacted most acutely—if not in the policing of desire and of grief, or the rebellions that are borne of it?”
The challenges of writing a poem like “[Immigration Interview: Chinese Exclusion Act 1882]” were manifold, although many of them were ethical in nature, rather than poetical or technical. I have talked at length about the importance of proximity, but I think it is equally important to consider its dangers. What is it to be a “secondary witness,” to create art which moves towards another’s trauma— particularly a trauma that has been filtered through the fractured lens of history? What is the nature and degree of proximity that I need as a writer and a witness? Should I have had first-hand experience of the event itself? Where is the thin line between witness and voyeur? To what extent does one have the right to claim a collective, cultural trauma? How might the writer implicate themselves in the complex relationships between power, representation, and language to avoid producing the kind of self-gratifying, self-cathartic, and pious literature that the state employs to vindicate themselves and to avoid legitimate confrontation with the past? Perhaps even more fundamentally, is it enough for a poem to bear witness at all, or will it always be an inherently passive act? How might we propel witnessing beyond mere commemoration and remembrance, and towards a generative horizon? As M. NourbeSe Philip aptly argues: “The living and the dead share an interest in the future.” Here, I’ve raised infinitely more questions than I can hope to answer, but perhaps that is for the best. Afterall, each poem is a question unto itself, an eternal process of writing towards ethics rather than from, a way of asking why we speak through the poem at all.
NP: Water in its various forms–rain, snow, water in a bathtub, a vase, a pond–permeates your poems. “In the Snows of My Twenty Fifth Year” ends with “A quarter of a century ago, I was / thinking of nothing, not even you, / & I was the closest to water I have ever been.” What draws you to water? Is there something inherent to water that you find lends itself to poetry over any other element?
DC: This is a question I will likely be asking myself for as long as I continue to write. Like anyone whose genealogy has been burned away, whose dislocation in their sense of self and place is a given, I am inherently skeptical of essentialist classifications, false binaries, teleological views of history, and grand narratives of origins. Given these general skepticisms of linearity, static fixities, totalities, and binaries, it is perhaps unsurprising that I am drawn to the motif of water in many of my poems, consciously or otherwise. As material and phenomena, water occupies states of contradictions, flux, and contingency. For instance, “waves” and “rain” are suggestive of coherent forms yet are simultaneously characterized by their indeterminacy and amorphousness; water undergoes continual states of conversion and transition as it empties from one body into the next, as it temporarily takes on the shape of each new vessel, as it dissipates into the sentiment of steam and hardens back into the cruelty of an icicle. There is also an element of shifting relationalities: distant and disconnected lands are joined by the same bodies of water; both the presently living and the long dead bathe, circulate, nourish, yearn, fear, flee, and drown together, across, and within the same impartial, interminable ocean. In these ways, the various oscillating properties and resonances of water make it a perfectly placed motif to investigate the multi-valent complexities in the inherent murkiness and entanglements of deracination; to resist singular, fixed epistemological and ontological scopes of identity and belonging; to enact the difficult, paradoxical, and processual mappings of the displaced, hyphenated subjectivity.
However, it's hard to say if water innately lends itself more to poetry, as opposed to other elements such as fire or wind. For instance, I’m disposed to Dean Young’s thesis that poetry is no more a thing than fire is a thing, which is to say that it is the living instance of conversions between poles of reckless energies, between page and mind. Perhaps more to the point then, I think that water lends itself to poetry insofar as poetry deals first and foremost in primaries and elementals—in forms of “animal knowledge” and primeval bodily memory—before it even begins to enter the realm of cognition and consciousness.
Here, I must also conceitedly draw a connection to my own poem “A Letter from the Bottom of the Well,” which I end with the following lines: “down here / all water returns / to the body it came from / the body where we will meet again / & drink from what’s left of mine.”
