The Other Place: An Interview with Christine Kwon

photo provided by the interviewer

One of the most remarkable things about poetry, to me, is the way it finds you—often at the exact right moment—and says something so perfectly. Something just for you. Something you’d never know to say and in a way you’d never think to say it. 

I grew up on the waterways of south Louisiana, spending my weekends and summers in canoes and pirogues on the rivers, creeks, and bayous that pockmark and slice through the landscape. Over the past few months, I’d been working through an idea in my head: turning the Tangipahoa River, the one I navigated most often, into the river Styx. 

Charon would be my friend BJ, using the coins collected as toll to buy tall-boys, holding a paddle as he stands on the prow of an aluminum canoe. He also had a child too young with someone he didn’t love and helped ferry me across those opaque and turbulent waters. A three-headed alligator gar would stand in for Cerberus. 

My father would be Hades, of course, in his general detachment and haphazard interventions, his delegated judgment and inaccessibility. My mother, with her depressions and addictions, as Persephone—her high light and periods of joy overshadowed by the depths she would inevitably sink back down into. And so on and so forth; you get the idea. 

I’d been obsessing over it. Listening to the audiobooks of the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid in the car while dropping the kids off at school and picking them up. On morning runs. Just all the time trying work out this idea. So when I opened up Christine Kwon’s poetry collection “A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue,” pulling out of the bubble-wrap packaging and turning the pages to the first poem, I stood in my doorway, the sound of the breeze stirring the leaves fading away: I am rowing Father/ across the river Styx.

I met Christine at one of the wildest readings I’ve ever witnessed. I organized an open-mic style event at a cafe on the Westbank of New Orleans. There was a performance artist dressed as clown. The cafe’s air-conditioner was broken and it was summer in New Orleans. Excerpts from work-in-progress vampire romance novels. Entire chapters of unpublished memoirs. It was a marathon that lasted hours—a literary ironman. Christine, patiently waiting as names were drawn from a hat, was among the last to read. It was very late. So, so late. And she blew the house down. 

When she reached out to me a few weeks before that moment in the doorway, asking if I’d review her collection, I was surprised. I am not a poet. I said so at the reading a few times. I have written poetry, but that doesn’t make me a poet in the same sense that making scrambled eggs doesn’t make me an itamae who’s mastered omurice or tamago. I told her I’d give it a shot, and after reading it a few times, I had to talk to her about it. 

So we met up at a cafe in the French Quarter, had some matcha tea and sat outside while a gentle wind carried the heat away. A review became an interview and then a conversation among new friends.

***

Drew Hawkins: I can’t help it. I have to ask about the first poem, “The River (1963-2019).” Can you tell me a little bit about its significance and why you chose it to be the opening? 

Christine Kwon: Well, I think it just has to be the opening. It’s a journey to somewhere else. It’s across the river Styx and it’s the Hudson River in New York, and you’re going towards death. But I think it’s going to that “other place,” and for me, that’s what poetry is: it’s going to the other place.

My dad is an addict, a gambling addict, which is a strange form of addiction that a lot of people don’t talk about. People talk about alcohol addiction or other forms of addiction, but it’s just as bad. We lost our house. We lost everything. Every few months or years it would come back. I was visiting home and I met up with my dad and he’d been living out of his car and it was my first conversation with him confronting addiction and life on the street and he told me he was thinking of killing himself and mentioned some ways he’d do it. Then I was on the George Washington Bridge in traffic, and the bus was stopped because someone was going to jump. And I stood up in the middle of the aisle, pale as a ghost, cold-sweating, and had this gut feeling it was my dad. It wasn’t, but this poem comes from that moment.

DH: Yeah, life and death make regular appearances throughout this collection. I’m thinking of some of the images like dead cats, the act, identity, and consequences of birth that comes up a lot. There’s the death of poets, the death of friends. Is it your own way of grappling with these ideas. Are they things that come up frequently in your work?

CK: Death is always a major theme for me. First of all, my parents are always threatening to die. I think it’s because I see them so infrequently. They’re always like, ‘Oh, I hope I see you one more time before I die.’

But as a poet, one of my main reasons I write poetry is death. For me, poetry has a strong tie to mortality and also immortality. And I think when writers show up in my writing, it’s like these dead writers, but they're not really dead, because poetry has given them eternal life. And that is something that I'm always kind of obsessing over. And sometimes, I think poets need to die. They need to die and be reborn and start again if it’s not working.

DH: As you’re talking about canon and engaging with dead poets, I’m thinking about your poem “The Blue Feast,” where you’ve got William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Louise Glück, Yi Sang and others at a dinner party. Kim Hyesoon is taking a bath and hogging the bathroom. Is that you bringing everybody together in a moment to kind of reckon with it, or is it conveniently putting them in the same place to kind of, you know, surround yourself with it?

CK: These poets that are such giants, they haunt me. They are always in the same room as me, kind of belittling me and being like, ‘Well, what are you, you're just a bug. You're nothing.’ I often compare myself to the people on my bookshelves. And it's really hard just to write from that point of view or space because you're just like, ‘Why the fuck should I bother writing when Rilke is right there. I don’t need to contribute more poems to this world.’ 

They’re always in the room with me. And that poem, “Blue Feast,” they’re all partying and the younger crowd is in the hallway waiting for the bathroom, a typical party scene. Except Kim Hyesoon is now bathing and we can all hear her splash. It’s that anxiety of waiting in line and it’s fucking hard to be waiting in line. Are these people ever going to die?

DH: Right. And there are several moments in the collection that talk about, or include, or touch on the act of writing poetry. I’m thinking of one of the images that I really love, which is the idea of listening to wings flickering, finally having that space, that moment to write poetry. The speaker says things like ‘This happens to a poet.’ Can you talk a little bit about why the act of writing poetry and how being a poet makes its way into your work?

CK: This is kind of a more recent issue for me. Because I just started accepting my identity as a poet. That might be why it’s coming up. I’d quit writing for eight years and started back again a few years ago. I didn’t consider myself a writer I think until this book came out, which felt very sudden to me. I wasn’t expecting it at all. It just took so long to accept poet as part of who I am.

What that’s about is I think there’s a lot of tension between a poet’s place in society. It’s a difficult one. There’s really no room for it, it feels. It's exceptionally difficult, I think, to be an artist in America, to be a poet in America. I even struggle with being a poet in my house, being a poet in my family. It’s not really accepted. We never have enough money and part of the reason we never have enough money is because I’m a poet and I have to devote time and energy to that. So the act of writing poetry is tortured, for me. I’m sitting down and writing instead of making money, instead of advancing some way in society. It’s really cheesy, but it’s almost an act of rebellion, and it’s a difficult act for me, so that’s why I think it pops up.

DH: You know, we were just talking about this poem, “The Blue Feast,” and obviously the title of the collection is A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue. And colors generally come in throughout the collection, but especially blue. So for me, lines like ‘This poem is a butterfly/tattoo—trashy blue/like night on a face,’ and there’s the poem titled “A Little Drop of Blue.”  What is it about blue and what does it mean to you? Why does it show up so often this collection?

CK: Blue is the color that haunts me most. I know I’m not the first poet to say that. But for me, this has a very clean-cut answer. Ever since I was a child, the moment the day becomes blue before night, man, that haunts me. For me, it’s the loss of day. It’s like everything you wanted in that day is gone.

DH: So that moment fills you with regret or fear? Some people might look at that moment as happy, right? You know, the day is done, now I can spend time with people that I love, and eat, and rest. But that moment for you, that’s fear that’s associated with it?

CK: It’s not a happy moment. The coming of night scares me. If I'm being totally honest, the death of every day, the sun's going down every day, and that blue, it's like reality hits. During the day, I can kind of ignore reality, like a literal daze, like daydreaming. And when I feel like it's that blue, even objects in the room take on this ultra real, ‘I'm like, Oh, so that's what you are.’ It's like, the strip of dust has been like lifted off or something. And even looking in the mirror at night, I'm like, ‘Okay, so that's me.’ And it's, I don't know. Night brings me horrible realities.

DH: So is blue a mostly negative association for you?

CK: No. I’m a poet. I’m just feeling these things. I think it’s the prettiest color.

DH: So, at the same time, it fills you with dread, but it’s also the most beautiful color.

CK: I think it’s the most poignant color. It has a lot emotion in it. It’s not like a pretty sunset. I love that a part of nature can have such emotion.

DH: That’s interesting, you know, we talked about other poets and other writers in your work, but there are also a lot of allusions. There’s the river Styx in the first poem, but you also talk about the Aeneid at one point. Have you heard that the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for the color blue? Homer described the sea as ‘wine-dark.’ Does the inclusion of mythologies and allusions, is that a similar type of energy of corresponding with or addressing other poets? Is that just something you're interested in? How does that make its way into your work?

CK: My poetry has a lot of references, especially to the classics, both ancient Greek and Latin, but also the classics of the canon. That is another one of the major themes of my work. It’s like, ‘God, I want to be part of the canon so bad.’ And I know the canon very well. But I also feel a lot of resistance and also some resentment towards it.

I just think it’s good when poets make their own little world. Like the first line of that John Donne poem, ‘I’m a little world made cunningly.’ Dickinson’s little world is a garden with bees and flowers. In movies, they call it world-building. It’s there beside the plot and you need to do it to give your poetry a certain sense of reality. 

DH: So, these references are part of the world-building for you, then?

CK: Yeah, for sure. There are characters in this collection that also pop up again and again. Poetry is just this other little world I go to, but it’s more than that. If I leave that place, if I fill out a form or go to Lowe’s, I can’t write poetry because I just came crashing back down to Earth. I need to build myself up into that space. It’s either elevation or descent, but I’m not on planet Earth.

DH: I can understand that. You feel really protective of that space and not screwing that up.

CK: Can I ask you a question?

DH: Sure. Of course. It’s only fair.

CK: Because I am considering having children. How does that affect the protection equation? Because, obviously, children don’t care if they’re intruding on that little state of yours.

DH: I’d say, for me, it’s levels. There’s different types of writing. I can do copywriting, journalism, while I am a little distracted. I can put on headphones with the kids behind me and that’s okay. But if it’s creative, that’s why I get up early. Because they’re not there. People will tell you, ‘You can do it, you can have kids and do it,’ and you can. But it is harder. There’s no doubt about it. It’s definitely harder. I’m also the type of person, and it’s not like I thrive on deadlines, but I will get more done if I only have an hour to do it. Instead of being like, ‘I have all day to do this.’ If it’s like, ‘You have thirty minutes or you have one hour,’’ then I will get shit done because I know I really only have that hour.

CK: Can I ask a follow-up question? So I’m assuming that not all interjections are bad and sometimes kids can blurt something out and do something and it inspires you?

DH: No.

CK: (Laughs) Thank you for that honesty. Does it not work it’s way into your work?

DH: Yes, that definitely happens. But that happens outside of the act of writing. Like we’re hanging out. It’s great. They’re so funny and they say the most insane shit. And it does work its way into my work, but not while I’m actively writing. But for sure, the things that they do and the way that my life is because of them makes its way into my work.

CK: Would you say that they opened a new world of emotion in your work? I’m really curious. 

DH: So it’s not an unfamiliar type of emotion or love that you’ll experience. But it never goes away. Your baseline of concern and care moves up. Before then, you have family, friends. You have a partner, you love them. But when they’re at work or doing their own thing—they’re fine. When you have kids, you’re kind of always like, ‘Are they okay, where are they, what’s going on? Am I doing enough? Am I good enough? Should I have not done that thing the other day? Am I screwing them up for letting them watching a movie while I try to get work done?’ That kind of stuff is constant. It can be overwhelming waves sometimes, but mostly it’s just like a soft hum that wasn’t there before. 

And I don't know necessarily if, as a writer, I now have access to a level of emotional complexity that I didn't before. I think that as a person, you have a little bit more concern just all the time in your life, if that makes sense. 

CK: It does. It’s scary.

DH: A lot of things are scary that are good. Maybe most things. Or anything worth doing. You know, you get a new job and you're fresh, you're like, ‘Holy shit, I don't know if I can do this.’ And then a year goes by you're like, ‘I got this.’ You know. And things come up at your job, or things come up at whatever it is, and it's challenging in the moment, and it's a little scary, because it's a new version of that. But then it's okay. Because you know what you're doing, and you've done it for a while.

CK: Thank you for that.

DH: Of course. And I know you talked about this a little bit, but I’m curious to bug you about it a little bit more. The speaker, right, this idea of the speaker, the ‘I’ in the poem. In the collection, they go to parties, they lose friends, they have families and parents. They're funny. Sometimes they're kind of passive observers. Sometimes they're really actively engaged with making the world around them. So I'm curious, you know, how much of who you are and maybe who you want to be, or how you think of yourself, is in this collection?

CK: In Japanese literature, there’s something called the ‘I’ novel. Osamu Dazai, one of my favorite writers, he does this. He writes ‘I’ novels taking you on these existential journeys. For me, there’s the ‘I’ that goes to parties, but ever more present there’s the ‘I’ that is there when you wake up. And that internal monologue has like a different life than what I may be doing in real life. I might be teaching children paid by the hour during the day, but that internal ‘I’ is always also there. And both are related to poetry. And I think that poetry allows for that combination of those two worlds. 

DH: Do you feel like the two are at war with each other? The poet and the self?

They might be a bit fundamentally opposed. That may be different one day, I don’t know, if like I’m a professor teaching poetry at a university, and what I'm doing in my real life corresponds more to my concerns and desires as a poet. But right now, it doesn't, you know? I live two different lives: one as a poet and one as someone trying to make money, make the mortgage, pay the bills. I try to really maintain that balance, and I think that’s where a lot of the tension of the ‘I’ comes in. 

That’s why in one of the poems, called “Workhorse,” it says Because I love you I do the dishes I was thinking / I was trying to convince him that we’re two different people / That to write poems I had to stay home doing nothing/listen to a pair of wings flickering.

Christine Kwon

Christine Kwon is a Korean American poet and fiction writer. Her debut poetry collection, A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue (Southeast Missouri State University press, forthcoming March 2023), won the 2022 Cowles Poetry Book Prize. Her work has appeared or is imminent in The Recluse (The Poetry Project), Joyland Magazine, The Columbia Review, The Harvard Advocate, Copper Nickel, The Xavier Review, Hot Pink Mag and Annulet. She attended Yale and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in New Orleans with her partner and three cats. Follow her on Instagram @theschooloflonging or christinekwonwrites.com.