Grief, Hope, and Garbage

Transcript of episode

(Cold open soundbite/Chen Chen)
“I love this personification of grief, or this metaphor for grief, as a newborn, and all the things that one might do, right, to care for a newborn: the cradling, the doting, you know, feeding, right, the milk, but then it all of a sudden grows up, the grief… and it's like the grief needs to grow up in some way in order to be without you.”

(music)

(CAMILLE TRACK INTRO)
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Chen Chen contains multitudes. He is a highly regarded poet, teacher, and editor. His debut poetry collection, When I Grow Up I Want To Be a List of Further Possibilities, received numerous honors, and his second book of poems, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, was lauded as a best book by NPR, the Boston Globe, and others.

Chen Chen is our guest today on The Glimpse.

(music trails out)

Camille Rankine
Spending time with Chen Chen's poems, I find myself amazed at their deft agility, both in tone and language, their ability to spin the reader from laughter to revelation, from levity to rigorous inquiry, from consideration of the tiniest pleasures to deep reflection and confrontation of our own flawed humanity. The poems are open-hearted, playful, and pointed at the same time, asking us to step toward them, turn, and see the world as they do. Welcome, Chen. Thanks for being with us.

Chen Chen
Thanks so much for having me.

Camille
I'm looking forward to talking to you today. I've been spending so much time with your work and just thinking about, you know—I think you're so often funny in your poems, and I think that's really hard to do. And I wondered if you could speak a little bit about what you're doing with humor and what you think about humor in poetry.

Chen
Yeah, sure. It's kind of funny to be asked about that sometimes. Because I actually feel that I'm such a grouch in my day-to-day life. (Camille laughs.) So yeah, I think the fun that shows up in my writing, it really takes effort.

Camille
Interesting.

Chen
I’m interested in that effort of moving towards a pleasure or a joy or a consideration of those things, whether I am actually feeling that in the moment or not. I'm glad that there's a playfulness that seems to really come across. But yeah, most often, that's not where I start.

Camille
I think personally, as a Jamaican, I find grouchiness pretty funny. (Laughs.)

Chen
Like, okay, maybe that's a part of it then.

Camille
Like, I like a curmudgeon, I think that's just my sense of humor. But I do think there is a sense of play so often, and…but the play, it's, like, not purely lighthearted. Like there's—it's always tethered to something weightier, you know, like, an effort and an element of work, which I think is true of a more hopeful positioning…like, it takes work to be hopeful, I think, for a lot of people.

Chen
Definitely, yeah, hope is work. It's not just an inherent feeling that you carry around all the time. That's just, “Oh, I'm a hopeful person.” I don't, I wouldn't describe myself like that. But I would say I'm a person who's interested in figuring out what hope can be. Yeah.

Camille
Yeah. I wonder if there are people who are just like, always hopeful.

Chen
I don't get that.

Camille
Just like a happy Labrador or something. (They laugh.)

Chen
Yeah.

Camille
Good for them. I don’t get that, though.

Chen
Just waking up with positivity. I don’t know about that.

Camille
Just like, excited to meet the day. Just like…

Chen
No.

Camille
Good for them. I don't understand. I don't relate, but…

Chen
Love that for them. (Camille laughs.)

Camille
Love that for them. Yeah.

Chen
Yeah.

Camille
So I want to hear your poem. Can you tell us what you're going to be sharing today?

Chen
Yeah, I'm gonna read this newer poem that was published recently in Narrative. I say recently, but maybe, what was—a year ago? No, less than a year ago.

Camille
Yeah, that's recent.

Chen
In poetry time that's recent. It's new.

Camille
Yeah, it's new. It's brand new.

Chen

God, Gods, Powers, Lord, Universe—

If you cannot, at the moment, give me much joy,
I get it. I have asked
& received many a great joy
already. Just give me, if you can spare it,
a small joy, say, the size
of a ketchup packet. If that’s too much
to ask for, then how about a small
kindness, a tiny kindness, the size of a kiss
from a dust mote? No?
Okay. Would it be possible for you to take
away some things, then? For instance,
the soreness on the right side of my neck?
If you could remove maybe half
a pinch of that soreness, I would leap up
as though it were a great joy. I mean,
it would absolutely be a great, great joy,
thank you in advance, O
highest O mightiest O most.
Still no? Well. What about this
sense that everything has become
very slippery, everything is slipping
right out of my fingers & faster
every day? I’m not asking you to cure
my fear. Nor unslipify
my fingers. Only, if you could,
if you have a quarter of a split
nanosecond, it would be
greatly appreciated, see, I don’t
need joy or kindness
or ketchup, I
beg you, if you are
a being, a higher, some
Mysteries that can listen, can
mercy, I just need to lose
a little
less quickly.

(Recently published in Narrative - https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/spring-2023/poetry/god-gods-powers-lord-universe-chen-chen)

Camille
Thank you. I love that poem.

Chen
Thank you so much.

Camille
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. You're talking to God in this poem. And I feel like I've seen that you talk to God in a couple of other poems as well. What compels you to talk to God in your poems? Where does that come from?

Chen
That’s a really good question, because I honestly…I was thinking about that, because I knew we would talk about this poem. And I was like, “But I am not a religious person.” And potentially…

Camille
But God is all over the place in your work, I feel like, you know?

Chen
Yeah, I did not grow up in a religious household at all. We sometimes went to this local church, but it was more for the Chinese community at that church. And my parents never really talked about God or any religious texts. So, yeah, it wasn't part of my upbringing. But I guess it was just everywhere, anyway. And I think I just became really interested through poetry, actually, in different kinds of addresses, different kinds of figures, that a poem, a speaker, could talk to. And I just love that aspect of poetry that, you know, in a poem, you can talk to anybody, and they can answer you or not. But yeah, there's an interesting dynamic that can be suggested, right? It doesn't have to be spelled out or explained. But there's a voice, and I think the voice becomes more interesting once you have a situation for that voice, you know, an occasion for the speaker to speak, and an addressee to interact with. Oh, I think also, poems feeling like prayers, even though that wasn't, again, something I ever did. It wasn't a practice in my everyday life at any point. But I think again, in poems, I became really interested in that.

Camille
I mean, I was thinking about this poem as like a form of prayer, or like a reframing of prayer, in which it's, the prayer is, like, a negotiation or a series of requests that are ultimately either not answered or refused. I mean, I also was noticing how there's so much emphasis on smallness. When you were thinking about scale with that, like, the tiniest,

Chen
Yeah.

Camille
You know, these tiny little objects that appear in the poem. Like what was, what were you thinking with that?

Chen
Well, I think I was on the road a lot. And just eating a lot of garbage. (They laugh.) Like a raccoon. And I'm just becoming fascinated with all the waste involved in it. So the ketchup packets.

Camille
Yes. Yeah.

Chen
So much plastic, the little utensils, and everything's really flimsy. And sometimes difficult to open. (Camille laughs.) So it's like, yeah, you have your own little ketchup packet for your own little trash meal. So no, I just found that fascinating, that something could be so small yet big at the same time.

Camille
Mm. Yeah, that is interesting.

Chen
And there's something about prayer that felt like that. Again, it's like someone kind of outside of it, kind of witnessing it more than doing it myself, but kind of wanting to inhabit that space of having this one-on-one chat with a deity, a higher power, or with the universe, you know, whatever you kind of call it. And that was kind of the point of the title as well, which is also kind of playing with scale, the scale of the request, as well. Of, like—well, yeah. Prayer is not really supposed to be about just asking for stuff to happen. But I guess it's often used that way. (Laughs.)

Camille
Yeah, I feel like it is, it does go that way a lot. (Laughs.)

Chen
Yeah. So then I thought it would be interesting, or maybe kind of funny, to then play with, yeah, the size of the request, and have this speaker who's really aware of how much is being asked for, and it becoming this real bargaining sort of game.

Camille
Yeah.

Chen
And that really makes me think of, right, the bargaining stage of grief as well. You're pleading, you're requesting. I'm glad that you pointed that out. It's actually quite a large request, ultimately, for less loss, you know, to ask for something that miraculous, actually. But in a way, it's like the speaker here is trying to trick God or the universe into thinking, “Oh, this is the lesser thing. This is not as big a request as everything else.”

Camille
Right, Like, “Never mind all that, but just this one little…” Yeah. And you're like, is it really that small though? Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Chen
Thinking about it now, I wonder how much of it was kind of tricking myself, you know, into thinking, “Okay, maybe if the loss just happens less fast, then it will be less terrifying or devastating.” When I kind of know, that's probably not the case, you know?

Camille
Right.

Chen
But it's sort of like looking for anything to lessen the grief. But yeah, I was thinking about this lessening, this pleading for less personal suffering, I guess. Although at the time when I was writing this, I think I started it in 2021. So the pandemic was definitely on my mind a lot. It still is. But yeah, so even though the poem frames the kind of emotional trajectory as an individual one, but I think I really was thinking about this collective loss, or what is the space for collective grief? Which I think we still don't get much of, the time and the space to actually process so much tremendous change.

Camille
Yeah.

Chen
I think, you know, we're in a culture that really expects such a quick turnaround for everything.

Camille
Now you gotta get back to work. (Camille laughs.)

Chen
Yeah, exactly. It's all about your productivity, your labor. Yeah. You know, keep the gears of the machine going.

Camille
Yeah, absolutely.

Chen
And I think poems can be this space sometimes to slow down, to quiet down, to expand, actually. So yeah, even though the lines get shorter, I feel like the pacing is actually slower at the end.

Camille
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, the space around it is greater. So

Chen
Right. (Laughs.)

Camille
Yeah. All right. Well, on that note, let's take a little break.

Chen
So hopeful.

Camille
Poet life! Yeah. Yeah, let’s take a little break. And we'll come back and we'll talk about the poem that you chose as your inspiration.

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We hope you're enjoying The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We are the founders, Peter and Cathy Halstead. Our goal is to make poetry more accessible to everyone. And we do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thanks for listening.


Camille
All right, we're back. So I want to ask you about the poem that you chose as an inspiration. What did you choose to share today?

Chen
So this poem is called

“To a Dear Friend Mothering Misery”
by Kamilah Aisha Moon

Every time your grief cries,
you pick it up, cradle it
like a newborn. But your pain
isn't precious, not your life-long
responsibility. For each doting moment,
your soul refuses to sing for days—and the world
needs your music too much.
Please leave it be; no more milk. Let it cry
for nights on end unattended. Let it
forget how your heartbeat sounds, the warmth
of your skin. Stop making it soup when it coughs,
setting a place for it at the table or buying it
new clothes. Convert its old room into
a sanctuary for things you adore.
Let your ache become self-sufficient
and grow apart from you,
walk out the door
and forget to call home.
(from Starshine & Clay, Four Way Books, 2017)


Camille
Thank you. It's such a beautiful poem.

Chen
Yeah, I love this poem. I chose it for the way that it also deals with grief, though in a very different way from my poem. And I remember first encountering this poem in grad school. Kamilah came to Texas Tech and did a wonderful reading there. And we got to have a little conversation afterwards and…just really lovely. And I just remember kind of looking up into the huge Texas night sky and talking with her and thinking about her work. And we got to see each other one more time in New York City when we were in Best American Poetry in the same anthology, and I just remember, she went around and was taking selfies with everybody. And in just the giddiest way, and her whole face lit up every time just like seeing each poet, and that warmth and, like, spontaneity, too. And I kept thinking, “Oh, yeah, surely we will cross paths again.” You know? And we didn't. She passed in 2021. And, actually, yeah, I think I'd already been working on my poem, but I've kind of come to associate it, also, with her work, or just the brief moments of conversation we got to have. And so this poem too, especially the part that goes “and the world / needs your music too much,” makes me think of her. Yeah.

Camille
Yeah, I miss her.

Chen
Me too.

Camille
I feel like her loss was really deeply felt, I think, among poets and it was interesting to be sitting with this poem along with yours about loss and thinking about her. And thinking about grief, too, you know…this poem's handling of grief is really surprising. I mean, that choice that she makes to personify grief as this newborn infant, so that we're put in this position where our instinct is to care for and nurture it. I'm curious what you thought about that element of it.

Chen
I love this personification of grief, or this metaphor for grief, as a newborn, and all the things that one might do, right, to care for a newborn: the cradling, the doting, you know, feeding, right, the milk, but then it all of a sudden grows up, the grief. There's this kind of huge leap in time, by the end of the poem, right? Let your ache become self-sufficient and grow apart from you. And every time I read that, I'm kind of startled. I, you know, I was thinking, “Oh, this whole time, I thought it was a newborn, maybe a toddler.” But now I am imagining it as a teenager, you know, someone leaving home, maybe for the first time, like, going off to college or some other new experience, and, right, that last line, forgetting to call home, you know, all of a sudden having its own life. And there's something really powerful about thinking about grief, right, as something that you tend to, right, that you're taking care of, for a long period of time. And I really appreciate how seriously the poem takes that time, too, even as it's sort of advising to let go, right, please leave it be. But acknowledging that, yeah, it's gonna continue, right, to kind of you're living with grief, right? You share the same home. And it's like, the grief needs to grow up in some way, in order to be without you. And it's such a role reversal that we get.

Camille
Yeah.

Chen
I find that surprising, but emotionally accurate.

Camille
Yeah, that's such an interesting idea. I mean, the idea of preparing it to be on its own, and the life it will have after you're done caring for it, it will still have that life. You know, I feel like the poem…the ending feels so bittersweet to me. Yeah, like, in a way, when grief walks out the door, that is itself a form of mourning, like letting that grief go is its own sort of grief, which I think is such an interesting idea.

Chen
Well, because maybe it's like what you become attached to is the grief itself or the process, right, you become attached to the grieving, and yet you need to prepare it to be on its own. Such a surprising shift.

Camille
It is so surprising.

Chen
Like to think about growth in that way, too.

Camille
Yeah, absolutely. It's growth on behalf of the grief and the griever in a way. And there's so much mercy, I feel like, in the poem...the way that that metaphor, that personification, is operating, puts us in the space of completely understanding why the person would be nurturing the grief, “But of course you would.” It's so nonjudgmental. It's saying “I know why you're doing this, but it's time for you to let it go.”

Chen
You know, I think that my own parents, who have certainly had trouble (they laugh) kind of letting go of their children

Camille
So much in that word. (Laughs.)

Chen
Yeah, to let us have our own lives and make our own choices, make our own mistakes and learn on our own. But there is such a sense of, I think, both fear and kind of this responsibility, right? The concepts, not your lifelong responsibility. Right

Camille
Right.

Chen
Every thing that your grief does, right, like your kid does. But you kind of can't help but feel that way, as a parent, of course, that everything is your responsibility forever. (They laugh.) But then that can also get in the way. Yeah, right. Letting your kid—not only letting your kid do their own thing, but to actually see them as a fully grown and developed person, right, with their own needs, their own dreams, and their own way of moving through the world.

Camille
Absolutely.

Chen
And I think that's just…it's so beautiful to think about grief that way, that it's not something you need to take care of 24/7. That it's…it grows up in a way.

Camille
But that there's still space for it. And it's still, it's still there, which feels like a way of honoring it, as well. Right. Yeah. It's lovely. Thank you so much for bringing this poem and, you know, bringing Kamilah Aisha Moon's name and being into the space. It's really nice to be thinking about her again.

Chen
Absolutely.

Camille
So what are you working on these days? What's your next project looking like?

Chen
Well, I’m supposed to be working on essays.

Camille
You're supposed to be?

Chen
Yeah, I have a book of craft essays.

Camille
Oh, great.

Chen
But I've been procrastinating. (They laugh.) And just working on poems. But yeah, I need to kind of make more space for—it's just, it's a different part of my brain…

Camille
Oh yeah, definitely.

Chen
…it feels like, to think about essays and, yeah, the kind of clarity and argument-making that that requires of me is very different. So yeah, it's slow going. But I'm really appreciative of the editors that I've gotten to work with, who are all, you know, when I'm in that Google Doc just fighting for my life (Camille laughs) they know, they know when to be reassuring, but they also know when to push.

Camille
Yeah. That’s a great skill.

Chen
Like, yes, you put these two images side by side. But what…like, in an essay, you kind of have to say what that means. And, you know, in a poem, it's like, yeah, your work is done by that point.

Camille
Yeah. You're like, done, two images side by side, right.

Chen
The implication of that! (Camille laughs.)

Camille
Yeah, you don't really connect the dots when you're writing poems.

Chen
Yeah. And yeah, I do appreciate the challenge of that, too. Yeah. To connect those dots, to actually say, “This is why it's important to me. This is, you know, why I am thinking about it.”

Camille
It’s nice to flex that part of the brain too, definitely. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to see both projects, a side project and the real project, whichever one is which? Looking forward to that.

Chen
We’ll see.

Camille
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for talking to me and sharing these poems.

Chen
Yeah. Thank you for your questions. And just for this whole conversation. I feel like I learned more about my own writing. (They laugh.) It was just, yeah, great to be able to talk about this beautiful poem by Kamilah, yeah.

Camille
Yeah. Definitely a joy. Maybe bigger than a ketchup packet? I don't know.

Chen
Yes. Way bigger, I would say, maybe even the size of a ketchup bottle.

Camille
Wow, that's pretty big.

Chen
Yeah, we've graduated. Yeah.

Camille
Yeah. Great. All right, thank you.

Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Chen Chen’s poem "God, Gods, Powers, Lord, Universe—” was first published in Narrative Magazine.

The Kamilah Aisha Moon poem "To a Dear Friend Mothering Misery" was published in the book Starshine and Clay, copyright 2017. It was aired with permission from Four Way Books.

Coming up next week, poet Solmaz Sharif delves into the power of silence in poetry, and its possibilities and limitations in our current political moment.

Make sure to like and subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find our episodes on our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email at theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com.


The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host Camille Rankine. Our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening!