A Conversation with Jane Wong

In discussing her feast of a second book, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books), Jane Wong said, “Poems make me feel both full in knowing and emptied of some sort of emotion I’m trying to express… A poem always leads me to another sprout of a poem.” For many of us, poems stir an inner hunger that, even in fullness, cannot be sated. We always want to read—or write—just one more poem.

Here, Wong delves into cycles deeply entwined with mortality: food and rot, love and disgust, hunger and deprivation, ghosts and the body. One relationship, one meal, one dream burns up; others fly forth from the ashes. Poem by poem, she writes about her ancestors as a continuum; she looks back, naturally, but also forward. What was theirs that is also hers—and what will continue beyond? In these poems Wong upholds, restores, and extends her family’s stories, myths, and metaphors by adding her own.

“It feels like I’m taking the nutrients I need in writing a particular poem,” Wong says, “and then I need to replenish myself by writing another poem.” This collection of deeply felt and formally inventive work begins with a Mad Libs-inspired hermit crab (“Mad”) and sustains through the long poem, “When You Died,” which honors missing family members who starved during the Great Leap Forward whose names she cannot—and will not—ever know. Fertile pauses woven between words, lines, and pages make space for both writer and reader to breathe and imbibe; these thoughtful rests transform an already uncanny and dreamlike book into a sacred space.

Wong’s poetics of haunting throbs throughout, a tell-tale heart beating loudly beneath the floorboards. In the final poem, “After Preparing the Altar, The Ghosts Feast Feverishly” she leaves us on our knees, listening keenly: poem-drunk, spent, electrified—and brimming with desire for more.

Conducted by Gabriela Denise Frank in 2022. This transcript has been edited for clarity and flow.

This morning I heard someone comment on Jean Valentine’s poems, how even her silences are saying something. It made me think of the fertile pauses in How to Not Be Afraid of Everything. How would you describe the kernels that this book formed around?

JW: Oh, I love that—and I love Jean Valentine. She was one of the first poets I read early on in my literary lineage.

I was thinking a lot about how this book came to be, and I think the central heart wasn’t necessarily the oldest poem. I really wanted the heart to be “When You Died” and it is kind of in the middle of the book, kind of like the beating heart. To reach out and long for an answer, for someone to say, Everything will be okay, but of course, we know everything is not okay…that longing is there. That was so central in the book, to think about what it means to want someone to answer you back, to give you some sort of solace, some sort of comfort in the things we’re afraid of.

With that particular long poem, I wrote [it] in pieces, so it does have different kinds of formal elements—some in prose blocks, some were prose breaks until lineation. I was building around that particular poem, and realizing that I didn’t want this book to be about just that, or just about the Great Leap Forward. I feel like my ancestors wouldn’t allow that. They would just be like, everything’s interconnected. So when you’re writing about heartbreak, racism, and the American dream, that’s all still somehow connected back to us and what it means to not have the full life we wanted.

I feel what you say about “When You Died”—it’s the heart around which the book radiates. The other poems fit around it, and fit together so well, then expand out. Like ripples in time.

JW: Time is such a funny thing throughout the book. Past, present, and future get smushed together. That was also an organizing—or, anti-organizing—principle. I wanted it to feel like there are echoes of things that start coalescing. I didn’t want it to be neat, per se. I’m thinking about the poem “Everything”. That poem—it’s almost like you can start drawing a constellation: there is one image there that connects to this one here—it’s all interconnected. My life, their lives—their lives that never really got to be full, right? What is passed down to this generation? What does that have to do with all the other parts of my life?

I should say that context is important. I mean, I began this book in 2016, and it’s funny that it comes out during the pandemic, because so many people are like, oh, wow, the title. And I’m like, well, I started to have the rumble in my belly during Trump. That was the context and writing. The majority of these poems [were written] under Trump’s administration. Even though I’m trying to walk away, how could I? It was so present in my—in everyone’s—daily lives in very different ways. And, you know, acknowledging my privilege in those ways, too. It’s complicated.

When I’ve tried to research my own ancestors, I’ve quickly met a wall. In the book, you talk about research only taking you so far. When and how did you know to leap off from that?

JW: That’s a beautiful question—and you’re right: the most important thing is the asking, the motion to try, whether or not you find anything, then asking what about that longing is most important. It was definitely frustrating at first, even thinking about it; I didn’t want to bring any pain to my family. This was something we didn’t talk about. Even me trying to find information almost felt like—I was worried, I was scared to discover what I found. I think I was afraid on their behalf. Emotionally, I didn’t find much.

It was even more scary that there wasn’t much to find. Obviously, that is complicated. A lot of the materials about the Great Leap Forward were censored. It gets deeply politicized, trying to reach out to something that you’re not quite finding—what your heart wants to know. To some degree, it is a luxury to interview family members for particular projects. That requires a lot of things I didn’t necessarily have in motion: [because of] my language skills, I can’t have a fluid conversation with my family members. Beyond that, I didn’t want to stir up that trauma. Instead, I gave myself a task of deep listening.

With what I did find, I needed to speak about the process. I was really inspired by Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, which is a graphic memoir about her family and being a Vietnamese refugee. She writes about how difficult it was to speak to her family. There are literally graphic panels where she’s drawing herself draw, which speak to giving yourself permission to be in the messiness of how difficult it is to try to get material, whatever that may mean. The point isn’t to get it “right”—what’s right is to feel through the longing. That’s what I was trying to do: combine the things I did discover with deep listening to the stories that don’t necessarily mention it. It’s a second-slash-third layer of sorts. My mom was born at the very end of it.

This book is not meant to be archival. I have a lot of feelings about the archive—I feel like the archive itself can’t be stable. It’s not possible. It’s so biased in so many ways. I discovered that very quickly when I started to research, so thank you for that question. It’s complicated. Actually, I ran into an issue yesterday, where a newspaper or magazine asked me some fact-checking questions, and I couldn’t answer them. It was like, I’m sorry, I can’t do it. If I’m not comfortable giving my family members’ names out, I don’t feel comfortable. Of course, poets wouldn’t necessarily ask that of each other, but it’s a different lens.

When a name ends up on a list, which is someone else’s artifact, it begs the question: who’s making the list? And who catalogues the names of those who didn’t make it onto the list? Who is left out, left behind, or erased? Parallel questions reside in translation: what is lost in translation, or what is not translatable?

JW: Exactly. And who is this for? I always have to remind myself of that question. Who am I trying to honor? Writing about this, I was like: do I want to do this? Not many people do. It would feel like less scary if more people wrote about it, but these are risks you take.

Agreed—and your poems do go to risky places. You’re creating opportunities for others, in part, by holding open the door to the uncanny. The image of the owl whose head spins—not turns but spins—the grandmother who coughs up a cricket, slashing tires with teeth, and also the teeth like needles to stitch a factory of everything made in China. These details uplift the poems, the whole book, really, into another realm. How do you invoke the uncanny in your work?

JW: Yeah, thank you so much for that, Gabriela. When I was just talking about the archive, that I have funny feelings about the archive, it was like, if I don’t have an archive, I have a mythology and stories that my family passed down to me, but I also help to create that mythology. With the uncanny, it’s the things that we’re most afraid of: how could that have happened? I’m not just talking about the Great Leap Forward, but everything: abusive men, toxic men, really terrible racist things that have been said to me—like, how could that have been?

I keep returning to the uncanny or surreal moments—an animal’s head spinning—asking why that can’t be reality, or why that can’t be possible. I turn towards those spaces. The book is wrestling with ideas of power: who has power, who doesn’t? In creating those images, I felt very powerful. I felt as if I could slash tires with my teeth, or I could make something happen that isn’t physically possible. I like that imaginative leap of creating a mythology for myself and for people, particularly family, who feel powerless. That’s something I’ve always thought of when I’m writing: do I feel like it’s something powerful for me to do as an act? Sometimes, that power is due to transformation. I actually have to transform what is familiar in this world into something unfamiliar. I appreciate that comment on the uncanny because the tilting of the head also happens in the actual things that have occurred. That parallel is important to me.

It feels like some poems are containers for the uncanny, and other poems make the uncanny possible.

JW: Yeah, absolutely. I keep thinking about how to make the uncanny possible or calling it forth. Having some sort of invocation for it seems really central to me. In the poem “Everything” those toxic wild boars are real. That was actually a headline I pulled from the news. I was like, oh, if I could turn into a wild, toxic boar, what else might become something else? It’s twisted from what is real into something else.

We also see dreaming and sleep in this book. To your point about how entwined the real is with the uncanny, these poems made me wonder, have my eyes opened in a different world, or is this the world?

JW: I love that. I love dreams, especially the dream of the lopsided crown. I wanted to task myself with writing an autobiography in a short period of space. It becomes like a fairy tale. I was really just playing around with memoir.

What strikes me about your poems is that I taste and smell them. It’s not just surround sound, it’s surround experience. Do poems often start for you in the nose?
    
JW: Oh—absolutely. I was just talking to my students yesterday about how memories are tied with taste and smell. There’s something visceral about the smell of something, the taste of something—it’s guttural. You feel it in your body. I delight in other kinds of senses, but that’s always been important to me. I want to get close, to mix those senses, call forth a synesthesia in my work. I tell students to try to be as strange as possible, try to call all those senses together and see what happens.

When we try to remember something, it is oftentimes fuzzy. When you smell something or taste something, it can take you back fifteen years to a place. Smell, tastes, tactility, and texture are all important to me. Some of my favorite things to do in poetry is try to get, as you were saying, a surround sensory experience. That to me is really pleasurable. It’s my aim. When I’m writing, I want to be inside of the poem.

Some poems are nose-to-nose. They feel close—and full of time. The way food is portrayed, for instance: it’s nourishment, but it’s also putrefaction. Life and death holding hands.

JW: Right, right. Absolutely. In Overpour (Action Books), there’s probably even more rot. Fundamentally, I don’t know if it’s cultural or what, but it was just so part of me growing up: life and death. All these things were always so clear to me. Even the dead are not dead. We treated our ghosts—my grandparents and my great grandparents—we still feed them, you know? There is this kind of knowing that this process continues.

I joke around, but it’s kind of true, that I didn’t necessarily grow up religious or anything. I asked my mom at some point, “What’s our religion?” And she’s like, “You’re Chinese.” And I was like…okay… Because of that I’m a little bit Buddhist, and so I feel like there is something about this cycle and this belief in honoring that cycle, that what rots begets new life. Things have to rot. Sometimes I’m more curious about the things that can’t rot, like plastic.

Last quarter I taught a radical eco-poetics class, and thinking about this book in relationship to eco-poetics or climate change, there’s a kind of undercurrent. So many creatures and animals in the book are paired with the built environment, and it’s like, oh…can this rot? It makes me nervous if a thing can’t rot; [how do you] give new life to it? I think there’s that tension in some of the images.

I’m obsessed with mushrooms and just very aware, especially with food, of what it means to let food rot. It’s a charged thing in my family. I feel like that’s something I’m always going to be writing, the continuance of life and death and loss and love—it’s constant. In the last poem, “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly”, which I meant to be a mouthful of a title, in death, in the ghostly presence of my ancestors there is so much life and graciousness. It’s as if they are alive, and I wanted that tension there, and that reality: I do believe that they are, to some degree, still so vibrant and present.

One of my questions was going to be about the sense of fullness in poems; since you mentioned Buddhism, maybe I’ll shift the focus to impermanence. You can consume a meal and feel full for a time, but soon you will become not-full, then you’ll be downright hungry. No state of being is permanent. There is always change, always flow. Is it possible to feel full in poetry?

JW: I think so! This is maybe not so much Buddhist, but very Chinese, but I’m always thinking about what I’m going to eat for the next meal. Or sometimes the next day, I’ll think about being full, which is kind of a fullness, just the thought of it.

Poems make me feel both full in knowing and emptied of some sort of emotion that I’m trying to express, but that I get to pick up later. A poem always leads me to another sprout of a poem. It’s hard for me to think about poetry as something that’s discrete. I want that relation across multiple books, this constant desire to refill and be full in this way. Maybe the word to think about is nourishment. It feels like I’m taking the nutrients I need in writing a particular poem, and then I need to replenish myself by writing another poem. There are a lot of poems in the book that are a series, like a sonnet crown, that feel like, oh, okay, I want more. There’s always more to be had, you know? Where’s the next meal? [Laughs] That was really hard. I felt like this book could have been very, very long—like, super long. That was hard to envision: a three hundred-page poetry book. That’d be something else, right?

For sure. When I read poetry, I need a lot of space around it. There’s so much happening on one page.

JW: I’m writing a memoir right now and it feels like such a huge task to take on in terms of looking at the bigger picture and understanding how to fit in the pieces that need to be there, like bridges, more so than I would in poetry. I feel like sometimes when I read a poem, between one poem and the next, like you said, I need space. I don’t need to go straight into the next. I’m still in the process of writing the memoir, and I’m like, oh, this is so much harder. [Laughs] So much harder. I’m still learning. But yes, needing that breath—absolutely.

In a recent interview you said there’s not a metaphor for everything. It made me realize how much I’m constantly reaching for metaphors—for pretty much everything. I’m curious: what aren’t there metaphors for?

JW: I feel that deeply in multiple ways. I mean, my mother actually speaks in metaphors all the time. That’s just how she moves in the world when she’s trying to give advice or something, so I think about the times in which she doesn’t give a metaphor. She’s just also incredibly blunt. Sometimes there isn’t a way to mythologize or prettify—or to get nose-close to something. Like in “When You Died” how the poem opens up: I don’t know what to say, I can’t find the words to say anything. It’s funny, because in that poem and in others there are attempts at metaphor, trying to create [it] through sensory description, through imagery, to get close to it, but I know the failure of it, too. I’m very aware of that. 

“Mad” has the line, “This is a metaphor for ____” blank—like, what is that real thing, you know? Sometimes, it’s being super aware of trying to find language for something that there isn’t any other way to say. That’s something I’ve struggled with a lot. It’s really hard to wrestle with, or be confronted with, the bare facts of it. That’s also in “How to Not Be Afraid of Everything” where the bare bones of it, the bare facts—the bluntness of it—can’t be prettified. Growing up, my mom often bought a lot of discount meat and we know, okay, it expired yesterday, and it may be on the verge—or went over—but whatever. You cook the crap out of it and just see what happens.

Even though I grew up in a restaurant, and even though [despite] coming from my mother’s generation and the generation prior in terms of poverty, I grew up fed, but fed very differently from other kids. I know my mom struggled a lot to find food that was affordable within our budget. Knowing that, and knowing that was still protein—you can’t metaphorize that, you can’t prettify that experience. When I say there’s sometimes not a metaphor for something, sometimes it’s like, this is just it—this is the bluntness of what happened—it is what it is. Sometimes I can’t compare that to anything, but I still try. I’m very aware of my trying because I want to give it more hope or grace or possibility. But I’m okay with failing at that. 

As a poet, I want to be very aware of—even if my mom or my family were to read my poems, which they don’t really—they could still get it, like, okay, that’s what Jane’s trying to say. I always think about that. Then again, my mom always talks in metaphor. She loves making up all of these analogies and stories, any sort of advice is like an idiom; she makes up idioms all the time. I think that’s why I am the way that I am. I often see the world through like, oh, that’s just like a cow; it does this. My mom will say that—she just likes to talk that way.

One alternative you employ, which is somewhere between the uncanny and metaphor, is transmogrification. For example, in one poem you turn into a boar. Is this a way of saying that we have to see something differently to see it more clearly? Do we need second sight to have insight?

JW: Oh, yeah. Honestly, I draw on my child self a lot, thinking about how younger Jane or baby Jane saw the world. I think how she saw the world was that she could literally transform things or make things happen that couldn’t happen, say, in the plane of reality. To alter things in this way, to cut things open, to see it from another direction is often me trying to see it from my child-self’s point of view.

For instance, I keep thinking about the end of “Everything” where, you know, you’re willing a rock to fall. When I was a kid, I used to stare at things really hard, like I had power to move things [with my mind], which is a thing in sci fi movies. I really did believe I had that power as a child—maybe inspired by Matilda—so I was thinking about that in terms of being able to cut a telescope open or break things apart, if I can look at it from another angle. If I could have the power to move something, then I might see something differently.

I’m always trying to look at things from another perspective so that I can offer myself a bit more solace or comfort. In thinking about this book being about fear, what else don’t I know? Sometimes I’ll get really upset or angry or scared of something, and my mom’s like, well, if you look at it this way, it’s not so scary. And I’m just like, huh. I’m always trying to figure out the other way of looking at it, except I crack open the thing and see what’s inside—which is what my child-self would have done. Returning to my child-self does a lot for me. That’s when I was the truest version of myself as a poet and a writer: when I was a kid. I made up so much. So many stories and poems and I don’t know what. I didn’t name them at the time.

You have said, I listened around what was not said, and I’m curious: what new questions have arisen for you from listening?

JW: That’s a beautiful question. I mean, I think that deep listening always leads me to other questions. Like what else? What don’t I know? What do I know? What’s seated in my body and my reflexes? Why do I act a certain way? 

For instance, I was just at the grocery store yesterday with my partner, and he said, “We should pick up some scallions.” My first impulse—and I said this—was, “I really need cilantro this week.” And he was like, “You can have both.” And I was like, oh, hey, right. He made a joke, and I was like, yeah, I get it now. But stuff like that [takes] a deep listening to myself. This is obviously passed down—this is a reflex, right? That you can only have one thing and make it last across a bunch of different meals. That is something I’ve been discovering in my deep listening, how it shows up in me just living my life. 

If someone gives me a napkin at dinner, my first impulse is to rip it in half, use one half, and give the other half to another person. I’m always like, save the napkin! Obviously, that’s coming from somewhere, and it’s not like my mom said to do that, or, “You can only have that.” My mom would be the opposite: “Get whatever you want at the grocery store!” That’s how she was growing up. But I know that something else is being passed down from some other space to me, and I have to deeply listen when it happens on a daily level. Something happens, the antenna goes up, and I’m like, where did that come from? It requires more study. And even deeper listening.

Jane Wong is the author of two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). Her debut memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, is forthcoming from Tin House in 2023. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, and others. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University. 


Gabriela Denise Frank is a transdisciplinary storyteller, editor, and educator whose work expands from the page into the sonic, the visual, and the experiential. Her writing has appeared in True Story, Tahoma Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, Bayou, The Normal School, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. The author of Pity She Didn’t Stay ’Til the End (Bottlecap Press, 2022), she serves as creative nonfiction editor and managing editor of Crab Creek Review. Her art practice is supported by fellowships, grants, and residencies from 4Culture, Artist Trust, Centrum, the Civita Institute, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Mineral School, Seattle Public Library, Shunpike, Vermont Studio Center, and Willapa Bay AIR. www.gabrieladenisefrank.com