Monica Youn has published four poetry collections: Barter (2003), Ignatz (2010, a finalist for the National Book Award), Blackacre (2016), and From From (2024). Formerly an attorney, Monica’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the William Carlos Williams Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She is a member of the Racial Imaginary Institute and teaches at Princeton University.
In this interview, we discuss questions of home and belonging, multiplicity, race, poetic inspirations, and Monica’s next projects.
Renée Flory (RF): I’m curious about the epigraph to From From, a quote from Paul Chan: “Is there a direction home that doesn’t point backward?” I’d love to know if, in writing this collection, you answered that question for yourself—and how you were thinking about that quote in relation to your project.
Monica Youn (MY): I think that the question of home is something that’s always really interested me. What is your home? What do you think of as your home? I grew up in Houston, Texas in the 1970s, and even when I was growing up, people would say, Oh, you’re not from around here, are you? And I was like, Well, actually I am, but you clearly don’t think I belong here. We were one of the few Asian families in our neighborhood. I was almost always the only Asian kid in our class, and my parents had ended up there through the oil industry, but I think they would have been disappointed had I stayed there. So is Houston my home in that sense? I traveled around quite a bit, for a while. For example, I would cheer for South Korea in the Olympic games, but I wouldn’t necessarily cheer for them over, say, the US. I’m like, Okay, so where are my loyalties? I had not really been to South Korea because my mother’s family had all immigrated, and my father was estranged from his family in Korea, so we didn’t go back. There’s this idea of Korea, this idea of Asian-ness that was being imposed upon me, and I’m like, Well, is that a home to me? I think that the answer that I found for myself was to reconstruct the idea of home out of what I have, rather than out of what I don’t have. Paul Chan’s quote is looking back to some idea of homeland or authenticity that I’m just not going to possess, and to try to carve out a space that is a space of unbelonging where I belong—to say that you’re “from from” is to name from-ness itself as a liminal condition, and that was what I was trying to do in the book. I don’t know if I kept my eyes on the prize as much as I might have, because I was also dealing with big questions of Asian-ness and interracial relations and anti-Asian hate. But it was certainly the idea that I went into the book thinking about, or an encapsulation of the idea.
RF: “STUDY OF TWO FIGURES (PASIPHAË / SADO)” brought to mind the poem “38” by Layli Long Soldier for me. I think what I was seeing there was this narratorial assertiveness that really grabs the readers’ attention and commands a certain respect for the voice through those choices. You also reminded me of “38” through the balance of short and long sentences, which I thought was really complex and lovely. I would be curious to know if that assertiveness or that question of length were things you were thinking about when writing the poem.
MY: Yes, absolutely. I think that Layli’s poem “38” was one of the poems that inspired a lot of the work in this collection. This is the subject of the lecture that I’m giving immediately after this—what it means to take on a sort of power language. I’m coming to poetry from a legal background, and law is a language that I think of as a power language. It’s a language that people have differential access to. It’s a language that people are conditioned to react differently to. So what happens when you evoke that kind of power and rhetorical force in the service of poetry? But being a BIPOC woman, as Layli is, to also do so in every awareness of how that voice has been deployed against the powerless. Layli’s poem is set in a book where she questions legal language, questions treaties, questions power throughout. Her invocation of this sort of power language can’t be taken at face value, and I think similarly, I wanted to have a very rigid voice in particularly that opening poem, but one which would eventually crack or collapse of its own brittleness. It’s very easy to say something authoritatively. Keats did it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The Supreme Court did it, “Corporations are people, money is speech.” I think that those assertions bear something in common. Using that language to undermine it and watching it fall down is interesting.
RF: Absolutely, I see that in the collection in a really exciting way. You probably speak about this often, but I did find some version of the word “contain” 49 times in From From. It was clear from the start that you were very interested in containment and containers, and I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more about the act of being contained, and what you were exploring about containment in this project.
MY: I mean, I don’t think I was talking about containment per se; I was talking about race, and a container as a metaphor for race. I’m kind of excited to hear the actual quantification of the number of contains in the work, because I was doing that very deliberately—I like to use almost a mechanical form of repetition as part of that authoritative voice, a machine that can only go increment by increment. Back to your question, I think that the container metaphor came to me while writing the first poem. The first poem was the first poem I wrote for the book, and it kind of set the tone for the book in that it was so useful to have this metaphor, because race is, you know—what is a container? A container is, first of all, a barrier between inside and outside. It usually can’t be passed through in some way or seen through in some way. It creates an opacity. Secondly, it contains something. Now, what the content of that is is hidden from the outside. So race seemed to fit that very well, because the social construction of race is a barrier that we interpose between a self and another, right—a barrier that prevents understanding and seeing, knowledge. Then what is filled up by the container that is formed with this barrier? I grew up in a way that people were expecting my Asian-colored container to contain certain ideas about “authenticity,” which they thought that I would possess, and also some extremely negative stereotypes. That continues—people don’t come to me seeing me. I remember I was being interviewed for a radio show and the interviewer said, Well, when I read your book, I was expecting you to be talking about the Korean War. This was about Blackacre, about infertility. And I was like, Do you commonly think that you know what white people’s books are about before you read them? It’s these strange expectations that people who are not of your race put into the container, and then the way in which that creates a normative space—I am expected to be authentic in certain ways, and therefore I am a ‘bad Asian’ if I do not behave in those ways, or if I do not possess this knowledge, and also the feeling of lack that’s engendered if that container is not filled with what it seems to have been shaped for. I like to get a metaphor and chew on it and just keep chewing on it as long as I can. My second book was a book-length meditation on a single metaphor. It was satisfying to keep coming back to that place.
RF: One of the ways that I noticed you thinking about race was through the childhood and young adult lens. That space comes up several times. I wondered what it was like to look backward in that way and inhabit your younger experiences—though of course I couldn’t say how fictional they are, or if they were your experiences at all.
MY: Yeah, a lot of them were fictional. I’ve never written the I was growing up and then this happened to me sort of poem in the first person. I very rarely write that kind of poem at all, mostly because my background is not that interesting. That piece is part of a series called Deracinations, and I was creating a series of sonograms, which are a sort of anagram-type poem where you use the letters and sounds contained in a word, say, “deracinations,” to create a sonic landscape, and then write using words out of that landscape. I tried doing that with this word deracinations, which seemed to me very much like what it is. Deracination is racial uprootedness. It’s not oppression, it’s not discrimination, it’s not one of these more dramatic words, but it’s always there, and the sounds of it are soft, ubiquitous sounds that are always there. That was very much my childhood—race was always present, and sometimes it would loom into actual racism and then recede, but a sense of otherness was always there. I wanted to try to write into that space, but I couldn’t do it until I went ahead with this formal project and generated nine pages of anagrams on the word deracinations, and then found my childhood in those words, or some version of my childhood, sometimes fictional. I was looking at the words and putting them together in patterns, and this is what happened.
RF: “STUDY OF TWO FIGURES (ORPHEUS / EURYDICE)” is one of a few poems I’ve read that truly achieves what feels like a choose-your-own-adventure style, such that one might read it as fragments or according to the direction your eye naturally takes you, which I really enjoyed. I wondered if that made you feel in conversation with readers, or if you felt that you ultimately have a particular affinity for one way of reading it or another.
MY: The form for that poem is called a contrapuntal, and the particular variant I’m doing is called a triple contrapuntal; most are two columns and this one is three. I didn’t initially write it as a contrapuntal—I wrote it horizontally, and I actually published a version in The Paris Review before deciding that I hated it and would have to do something drastic to it before the book, that it was just too basic. I went back to it and started playing with it and decided that I wanted it to be much more equivocal than it was. Autobiographically, it’s a poem about my divorce and getting out of a bad situation, but leaving someone who I used to be in love with—leaving someone there to become the person who he was going to become without me, which didn’t look like it was going to be a good trajectory. Divorce is not an experience that most people have unequivocally good feelings about, and so I wanted the poem to be multivalent in that way. That was very much the experience of putting together my life after the divorce, going Okay—this is what I have, what am I going to make out of this? This is what I can work with. It’s not what I expected I would be doing, but let’s go forward from there.
RF: Thank you. Many times in From From, you take an idea and approach it from various different angles in a series of poems. I was hoping you could talk about multiplicity and how that helps you explore your ideas in a collected work.
MY: This is a habit that I’m really addicted to, partially because I’m an anxious person and decision-making is what really triggers my anxiety. It’s much better for me to be able to say: I’m going to give myself multiple chances. I’m not going to try to nail this in a single take, particularly with something as complicated or as difficult to talk about as race. There’s no such thing as getting it right when you’re talking about race. I thought that to come to these questions from a variety of angles was what made sense to me as a person and as a poet, and it takes a lot of pressure off of it—I’m always looking for ways to write toward what I’m afraid of. Writing about race is terrifying. The night before certain things would go live, I would wake up convinced that I was gonna be pilloried, so I’m always looking for ways to take some of the pressure off to go at various topics. My son’s very into military history, and it’s kind of like going at an army—if you go at something you fear, you don’t go straight on. Sometimes the way to do it is to flank it. Sometimes the way to do it is to go at an oblique angle. A reviewer once said that my poems reminded him of Perseus, who kills Medusa—going at the monster backwards, looking at its reflection in the shield, right? You still get there, but you get there by an unexpected path. I’m always trying to figure out ways to trick my defensive apparatus to allow me to get at what I really need to get at. I think that multiple takes is one of the ways in which I do that, and that’s a practice that I follow pretty much throughout my writing life.
RF: Given some of those anxieties, I’m curious about the fact that this book does feel very confessional at times. There’s a moment in particular that goes, “I think I’ll salvage the line about Latasha Harlins, that I’ll write a more worthy poem about her when I have more time. That was almost nine years ago.” There’s a very confessional element to it.
MY: Particularly when you’re writing about topics that require moral judgment of an other, or criticism, for example—at one point in the poem, I have the line “YOU ARE IN NO POSITION TO CRITICIZE ANYONE”—for me it’s important to include myself in the camera frame of what I’m criticizing, so that the reader is able to assess me and where I am standing as the criticizer of whatever it is that I’m talking about. I think it is unethical to come to questions such as race as some omniscient person who has no skin in the game. I do have skin in the game, and it’s a very particular skin in the game. It’s a skin that, like most skins, has various valences of privilege and lack of privilege. Let me say that I am not drawing a mantle of certain kinds of oppression over myself. There are experiences in the book that I talked about that did not happen to me. I’m not a spokesperson for Asian Americans. This is who I am, particularly.
RF: I see a lot of storytelling in this collection, more so than in your other work that I’ve read. It felt like there was a real pivot to a fairly linear storytelling style, even. I was wondering how you envisioned this work as your opportunity to do that storytelling.
MY: I think that’s absolutely right. I am attracted to narrative—I stayed up late last night reading a literary narrative—but I distrust it for myself. I think I have absolutely no skill at it, but one thing that was fun about the sonogram is that I got to tell stories about my wacky childhood, which I just never had the opportunity to do—growing up in Houston in the ’70s as an Asian person was batshit, it was crazy and strange things kept happening. The “CHRYSANTHEMUM-PEARL” poem, the Dr. Seuss story, is not that linear but does have a beginning and an end, and it was my attempt to work out my very complicated feelings for Dr. Seuss. At the time, my son was about three or four, and so Dr. Seuss is something that a parent comes to terms with.
RF: Do you find that in working to do some storytelling, the formal approach to your poems naturally changes? Do you feel at all that there’s a relationship there between story and maybe length and form?
MY: I don’t know about length, but certainly tone—tone is always what I’m concerned about in a poem. All formal choices come down to tone. You write in a form in order to achieve a certain tone that you would not be able to approach otherwise. When I wrote narrative in this book, it was always through the lens of some sort of extremely stylized form or distancing, like the Dr. Seuss narrative through the lens of the fantasy of a fantasist, or the fantasy by a fantasist, and the childhood poems through the formal lens that I was previously talking about. I don’t know why I don’t want to write a poem that is simply unadorned, or relatively straightforward storytelling. I think I would be more inclined to put that in a prose block, or make it something like a flash fiction, than to write it in a lineated poem. For me, lineation has other uses, and if I were doing that just narratively, I would feel like I was just being decorative.
RF: Having observed changes in form between Blackacre and From From, do you feel that those shifts are happening naturally in your work, or is it more that you are writing into collections as you come into your narrative or your story or whatever a given collection is trying to do?
MY: You know, the funniest thing I noticed about myself as a form maker is that as soon as I quit working as a lawyer, my lines became much longer. I am somebody who has a real distrust of defaults. I don’t ever want to be somebody who has a characteristic line length or whatever—that tells me that I’m not thinking through the subject matter carefully enough. Every approach to something that you’re trying to write or write about should have its own mode in order to get it right. There are exceptions to this—this is not what I look to in other poets. Poets I adore, Rae Armantrout, Carl Phillips, they have deeply characteristic styles, and it’s wonderful to get to experience so much of the world through those styles. I don’t think I’m that kind of a poet. For me, half of the pleasure is figuring out, Okay, what is this? What is the thing that’s going to allow me to solve this problem? I think of it like making buildings. You make a kind of building to solve a problem, and an amphitheater is going to look very different from a parking lot which is going to look very different from a shopping mall. They’re all spaces of interactivity that you’re designing in certain ways for certain effects.
RF: Could you tell me a little bit more about your work with the Racial Imaginary?
MY: The Racial Imaginary Institute is a group of creators, academics, and curators which Claudia Rankine put together around 2017 based on the proposition or the belief that a lot of the pathologies of our current racial array is that we are caught in the grip of certain imaginaries, certain ideas about race that have become calcified in our society. Given that so many of these are imaginative constructions, it should be the work of workers in the imagination to reimagine them—to think about alternative ways of structuring reality, particularly along racial lines. We have had so far two major projects. One was on whiteness, on the idea of whiteness as habituation, the way in which whiteness creates a certain kind of space, and the second was on nationalism. For both of those, we convened for an art show and residency and symposium, and we’ve been lucky enough to have had some very major creators agree to work with us. We also get together and have these very long, book-club-style conversations around questions like nationalism, anthropology, and history, and a lot of the thinking that’s come out of those conversations is reflected in this book.
RF: That leads pretty seamlessly into a question that I had when reading: when you publish a collection, do you think about who you’re hoping to be in conversation with, or is that something that is also revealed after the fact?
MY: I’m very interested in the idea of audience, but that doesn’t mean I’m trying to exclude some audiences or only writing to a certain audience. The work is going to land differently with different audiences. That’s going to be a relatively shifting thing throughout the book and throughout individual poems. I think that if I had a social justice style aim for the book, I wanted it to open up certain modes of conversation between the Asian community and the Black community. The thing that I have been most heartened by about the reception of the book is the way in which certain Black authors and writers who I really respect have seen the book as a way to enter into those conversations. That really warms my heart.
RF: Could you tell me a bit about the poets who either inform your work or inspire you?
MY: Oh, goodness, there’s so many of them—pretty much all of them. I’ve never been a schools or styles sort of person, I just love it all. For this book, Layli Long Soldier, Claudia Rankine, Bhanu Kapil, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—and I have poems in there explicitly after Carl Phillips and Martha Collins. Anne Carson is a perennial favorite. The parable poems were loosely inspired by Louise Glück. Jorie Graham is constant inspiration to me; Rae Armantrout is an inspiration and mentor. John Yau, Susan Briante, those Shane McCrae books I read constantly. There’s just so many of them, but those are the people who, as soon as they have a new book out, I must have it.
RF: For a final question, I’d love to know what you’re working on now and a bit about your poetic practice.
MY: My poetic practice is nonexistent—I have the worst habits of any human being unimaginable. Since From From came out, I have been traveling so much, and I’m already bicoastal and just so scattered in so many ways that I have not had as much traction as I would like. I’m currently working on two projects that may end up being part of the same thing, and may not. One is easier to describe, the name of it is Pansori. Pansori is an ancient Korean epic chant form. You can think of it as being a little bit like Greek drama. You’ll have a singer and a drummer. The singer is also a performer who will tell a narrative, and then the audience is also participating. I am trying to use that to tell both the story about my grandmother and her relationship to my grandfather, who was a member of Syngman Rhee’s government—the first president of Korea who is notorious for massacring perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians during the course of the Korean War and after—and relating that to the foundational myth of Korean folklore, the Princess Bari story. Also, and this is why it’s way too complicated, trying to come at this as a feminist critique of the three ‘Neo C’s’ of Korea: Neo-Confucianism, Neo-capitalism, and Neocolonialism. Just in case that wasn’t hard enough, it’s being commissioned as an opera, so I now have to make this an opera as well. What I’m trying to do is to have three separate voices, maybe four separate voices: one, which is the primary narrative, telling my grandmother’s story and interweaving that with the Princess Bari story, the second being a folkloric and historical voice, and the third being the audience reaction, the contemporary audience. So far, this is all very conceptual. The second thing I’m working on, which is easier, is also Korean in nature. I tentatively called it Folk. A lot of what I do in my work is engaging with certain cultural artifacts, whether those be pop culture or whatever. So much of my life is spent reading or analyzing things that I’m pretty comfortable writing out of my desk chair in this way. In my search for Korean-ness, I’m engaging with various things from the video game Civilization VI to the zombie movie Train to Busan, just kind of writing into those.
RF: They both sound fantastic. Do you have an opera background?
MY: No, I know nothing about opera, but thankfully—thankfully!—I’m collaborating with a Korean American composer who is a friend of mine, who writes both in Pansori and in opera and says, Don’t worry, I’ll deal with the opera part, you just write!
