Art Is + Jennifer Huang
"Art Is +" is an attempt to view art through the eyes of artists and writers themselves. In wide-ranging interviews with vital new artists and writers from both Asia and the USA, the series ushers these voices to the forefront, contextualizing their work with the experiences, processes, and motivations that are unique to each individual artist. "Art Is +" encourages viewers and readers to appreciate art as the multitude of ways in which artists and writers continually engage with our world and the variety of spaces they occupy in it. Read our interviews with Symin Adive, Geraldine Kang, Paula Mendoza, Zining Mok, JinJin Xu, Leonard Yang, Monique Truong, Noorlinah Mohamed, Vithya Subramaniam, and Khairulddin Wahab.
Jennifer Huang was born in Maryland to Taiwanese immigrants and has since called many places their home. Their poems have appeared in POETRY, The Rumpus, and Narrative Magazine, among other places; and they have been received recognition from the Academy of American Poets, Brooklyn Poets, North American Taiwan Studies Association, and more. In 2020, Jennifer earned their M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers' Program.
A poet of intimacy and wonder, Jennifer Huang’s Return Flight, selected by Jos Charles for the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize, is both achingly physical and devoutly spiritual. Living in a lush Taiwanese landscape, their work meditates on lineage and history with deep consideration and complexity. Jos Charles remarks that their lines “dig inward and cling even as they unfold outward in excess and surprise,” and that Huang directs the reader “with clarity of scene and the delights of recontextualization.” For Emily Jungmin Yoon, the book’s conversation is “a journey” in which one “[emerges] a different animal, vigilant and curious about [one’s] body and its place in this strange, cruel, and miraculous world.” Huang’s voice is gentle and expansive: it guides us around the world it inhabits, and shows us its possibilities.—Janelle Tan
Janelle Tan: I like to begin by asking all the poets I talk to: what is a poem to you?
Jennifer Huang: In a conceptual sense, I think a poem can really be anything—a leaf falling from a tree, a toddler taking a first step, a text message saying I care about you. In that way, I suppose poems capture sacred moments. They’re kind of like photographs.
JT: Return Flight is set in the Taiwanese landscape. Mountains are both backdrop and metaphor in these poems. How has the Taiwanese landscape shaped the manuscript? When did you realize that the stories you were telling were set in Taiwan?
JH: Writing about Taiwan and ancestry has always been a part of my work. I learned about my Taiwanese heritage and about Taiwan’s history when I was in high school, and that was a huge turning point for me. Doing more research about it in college and then in graduate school gave me a deeper understanding for who I was and how this place—that I had only visited a few times—had shaped me so deeply. The stories have always been set in Taiwan, in a sense. Taiwan is always there.
JT: When I think about the landscape of this manuscript, I also think about the gaze your poems adopt toward Taiwan. Your poems are not looking back to a “motherland” or ancestral home but looking around at the space they inhabit. How do you characterize your poems’ gaze? How do you think of Taiwan?
JH: I think the gaze is one that is fraught, complicated, conflicted, worried, and loving. I first started writing because I wanted to document the way Taiwan—the land, the people, and the histories that they inhabit and lived—felt like an answer to every question I had about my life. I wanted to draw connections between my lived experience to history at large. At the same time, I knew that Taiwan wasn’t any answer and to try to turn a Thing into some kind of Ultimate Thing was an act of fetishization. And I hated that! I didn’t want to do it to Taiwan. So I asked myself, how can I do things differently? I tried my best to face this impulse and to challenge the way I was approaching these subjects and Taiwan itself.
"I think there are ways to fully return home, but I also don’t see home as a static destination. Just as healing is more-so a process than an endpoint, I think returning home is a process that happens in experiences and moments."
JT: I am so stunned by the sequence “Layover,” and the way it ties together all the threads of your manuscript: while reading it, I was struck by how you approach diaspora as you “just [wanting] to be close,” to overcome the perpetual distance. When you think about diaspora, do you think there is a way to fully return to a place you call home?
JH: Thank you for saying that! This is a difficult question, because I really don’t know and want to fight the first answer that came to mind, which was to say, no. I think there are ways to fully return home, but I also don’t see home as a static destination. Just as healing is more-so a process than an endpoint, I think returning home is a process that happens in experiences and moments.
JT: Thinking about that, do you think poems can offer a sense of returning?
JH: Oh, definitely! This might return to my thoughts on poems as capturing sacred moments. Writing and reading poems, then, allow us to revisit and return to those moments.
JT: There is a really strong reverence for the mythical and divine in these poems: in “Notes on Orange,” the speaker describes themselves as “a human who wants to be closer to god.” You address a variety of mythical figures – when did you realize that creatures, spirits, and gods belonged in the manuscript?
JH: As a spiritual person (who as a wee kid was already thinking about god and the universe), I think it was inevitable that gods and ghosts would end up in any writing that I do. It’s an extension of what I am interested in. Also, a part of how I relate to my Taiwanese heritage is through prayer and ancestral connection. Visiting temples, lighting incense, and praying is a huge part of what my family does when we go to Taiwan.
Gods and spirits also play a more conceptual role in the book in the ways that past events can haunt and manifest in the present. So I started to connect this line of thought by writing about Taiwanese ghost and spirit stories.
JT: I noticed that in poems like “Pleasure Practice,” the divine is invoked not just in rituals and in prayer, but in physical pleasure. In “Tanka”, the speaker makes the comparison “the ghost of our bodies”. What points of intersection between the physical and the spiritual fascinate you?
JH: I used to see the physical and spiritual as separate, when in fact, what is sometimes most spiritual is found within the physical world when we are fully present. So, I’m interested in this intersection because I feel pleasure—ecstatic and surprised!—when I encounter the spiritual plane while doing the most mundane tasks.
JT: Family, and the stories told between members of a family, are such a big part of Return Flight. I noticed a larger thread about how the stories told in our families create their own mythology. Do you think there is a kind of mythology in family? How do you think about Return Flight’s narrative of family?
JH: I think there is definitely mythology in family. In that way, my fascination with family narrative, especially in terms of this book, was an exploration of identity. Familial narratives are so interesting to me, because they are (usually) the first narratives we learn about who we are in community and relation to others, and they inform how we move through the world. They’re so engrained! So I’m interested in dissecting those narratives and seeing how far back they go—where did this story first start? Where did it come from? How has this narrative changed over time?
Family is complicated and full of contradiction. I see Return Flight’s narrative of family as one that not only accepts the family unit as flawed, but also tries to write into the flaw with love—perhaps, even, to walk towards a loving place.
“During Taiwan’s period of martial law, speaking up could cost you your life or the life of someone you knew. For many, being silent and compliant, then, became a way to survive.”
JT: The book’s first section deftly explores familial wounds, and a kind of intergenerational trauma. Familial wounds and intergenerational trauma are so deftly connected to the book’s notion of diaspora and return – I was wondering if you might be able to talk a little bit about how you think those concepts are connected.
JH: During Taiwan’s period of martial law, speaking up could cost you your life or the life of someone you knew. For many, being silent and compliant, then, became a way to survive. I was interested in how this silence infiltrated family relationships. I saw how events that were pushed under the rug or brushed off still haunted the home. They were silenced but still so, so loud because they came in the form of repeated behaviors and patterns.
Writing became a way for me to understand these patterns and how they lived through me. I kept wondering—how do I break this pattern? And I became obsessed with this notion of breaking the pattern that it ended up making me fearful of living my life. I was so hypervigilant about my actions and what they “meant.” So, return, for much of this book, is about unveiling and revealing the things that “shouldn’t be talked about.” But it is also about finding my way back to enjoying life and actually living without so much fear.
JT: In reading the book’s first section, the speaker’s depiction of their father made me think of my own Chinese father. I’m interested in the complexity of the Chinese/Taiwanese father figure, where the trauma and notions of masculinity that result in violence co-exist with tender moments of care. How do you depict complexity in the figures you write about?
JH: Complexity comes with time and willingness. Most of the poems about the father figure come from the point of view of the daughter, and because of that, earlier drafts of poems and the manuscript leaned towards a flatter rendering. It took a lot of writing and rewriting—and self-growth—to finally get to a place where I could write from a more nuanced place.
JT: Return Flight thinks about family and mythology, and tells those stories: how do you think about storytelling in this book? How do you think about telling stories of one’s homeland from its diaspora?
JH: Though I do think there is use in telling stories about one’s homeland from a diasporic perspective, I think there is even more use in hearing and reading the stories, historical accounts, literature, poetry, etc. from the people who live there or who have lived there.
While writing, I questioned my intentions for writing about Taiwan. Why did I want to do it? Was I the “right” person to do so? Was I just another child of immigrants writing longingly about some homeland? Then, I realized that, on some level, these questions were an excuse that kept me from writing and kept me from asking other, more important questions that had nothing to do with me.
I grew up listening to my elders gossiping, telling stories about the past, about the land and how we got to wherever we were at that time. When writing this manuscript, I asked my family to repeat those stories and ingested others from researchers, tour guides, and scholars. The accumulation of these stories are the heart and backbone of this book.
JT: I think about the final gesture of Return Flight: There is a stunning beauty in ending the collection on your queerness. What gestures did you think of when deciding on the end of the manuscript?
JH: Queerness, to me, is the ability to be free in who I am without the confines of what others may label as “right” and “good.” What is “right” and “good” to me? Being queer is how I fully express love! To the world and to myself. And I think this all ties into the poem itself. With “Manifest,” I wanted to write a poem that changed the fated narrative that a bull-figure tells the speaker—that the speaker “was to have / a life filled with cursed / love.” The speaker, through the poem’s journey, learns to say no to what is prescribed and say yes to leaving and making their own path. I guess this is what I hope people leave with when they read my book—a feeling of hope and possibility that they can have a say in who they are, no matter what stories they grew up hearing and believing.
“I grew up listening to my elders gossiping, telling stories about the past, about the land and how we got to wherever we were at that time.”
JT: This book is marked by a keen formal restlessness: you use the tanka, haiku, zuihitsu, lyrical sequences, and ambitious explorations of sound. What fascinates you about form? How do you think of form as part of the manuscript’s project?
JH: Form fascinates me because I am often surprised by how formal constraints can actually lead to some kind of creative relief. This theme ties into the manuscript’s exploration of a relationship to pain and pleasure, discipline and freedom—how sometimes pleasure is found through pain; freedom through discipline. I also enjoy aesthetics a lot, so the connection between form and aesthetics always excites me. Getting a poem to look good on the page—and sound delicious in the mouth—is very important to me.
On a project level, as I started to compile the manuscript, I noticed that I was using Japanese forms—like those that you mentioned—a lot and thought that that was interesting, especially in thinking of the period of Japanese rule in Taiwan and how that history affects the culture till today. To me, writing Japanese forms felt like that history had subconsciously imprinted onto me, too.
JT: In your work on this manuscript, how old is the oldest poem? How new is the newest poem?
JH: The oldest poem is “Departure [We pick wet flowers…],” which I wrote around 2014/2015. The newest poems are “Self-Pleasure” and “Disorder,” which I wrote sometime in Winter/Spring 2021 and added in after the manuscript was accepted. There were a few poems I was editing up to the end, such as “228” and “Disorder.”
JT: In thinking about the manuscript as a whole, when did the other points of intersection between thematic threads reveal themselves to you? At which point did the book’s “project” become clear?
JH: The project became clear after I wrote “Layover.” Before, the manuscript felt like a hodgepodge of poems. I knew they related to each other, but I also knew that the threads of connection weren’t fully visible. “Layover” was an important poem for me to write, because it was that thread that I needed. It was also such a freeing and playful poem to write. I think that poem had gestated in me for a while because, even though it’s since been heavily edited, I wrote the whole sequence in like an hour on some random afternoon.
JT: How long did it take for your manuscript to find a home?
JH: It took about ten months for the manuscript to find a home. I started submitting it in Fall 2020 and I got notice that it won the prize around June. It’s all happened quicker than I expected.
Janelle Tan was born in Singapore. Her work appears in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, No Tokens, The Margins (AAWW), and elsewhere. She earned an MFA from NYU, and is the Assistant Interview Editor at Singapore Unbound. She was a 2020 Brooklyn Poets fellow. She lives and teaches poetry in Brooklyn.
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