Art Is + Jenny Qi
SP Blog’s series "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.
Jenny Qi is the author of the debut poetry collection Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, Literary Hub, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships and support from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She is working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S.
Jenny Qi’s debut poetry collection Focal Point holds sorrow and optimism in the same palm. Her plainspoken voice reveals the complexities of grief: the open wound, the excavation of history, the moving forward while still hurting. For Paisley Rekdal, Qi’s poems “express the profound paradox of slowly healing from wounds you know you’ll never truly heal.” Characterized by such paradoxes and contrasts, Focal Point is kaleidoscopic, and in the words of Victoria Chang, “a book of crossing” that “inhabits the necessary liminal space of in-betweenness.” Qi is a poet of ravenous curiosity and clear logic, up against the bewildering mysteries of death. These are poems of a wide-ranging intellectual wandering.—Janelle Tan
"I couldn’t not remember my mother, even when I tried,
but remembering was too painful,
and so I put those painful, beautiful memories to paper."
Janelle Tan: I like to begin by asking all the poets I talk to: what is a poem to you?
Jenny Qi: Oh, that’s a really good question. I used to try to explain poems to non-writer friends as moments or emotional snapshots, but of course that’s not all it is. The longer I read and write, the more I think I don’t know what a poem is, and maybe a poem isn’t something that can be so easily defined. At first, I wrote “confined” instead of “defined,” and maybe poetry as a genre can be likened to a gaseous state of matter, not confined to a single shape but able to assume the shape and volume of its container. But I won’t discard that initial “emotional snapshot” definition because what drew me to poetry when I most needed it was the emotional immediacy that could be found in a poem and the lack of logic or linearity required of it.
JT: Focal Point is such a prism of a manuscript, because it uses everything around it (your father, your parents’ marriage, your partner, other instances of death around you) to reveal the grief and loss at the center. In talking about loss, when did the book also start to think about both the joy and bitterness of living?
JQ: There was a line from Yann Martel’s Life of Pi that I really liked in high school: “Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can.” My mom was someone who had suffered a great deal in life, even well before her diagnosis, and yet she had been such a vibrant person, so I grew up watching her eat bitterness and find joy in life anyway. After she died, I became even more conscious of that, and I think those elements entered my writing fairly early, and the way the manuscript is put together somewhat reflects that.
"maybe poetry as a genre can be likened
to a gaseous state of matter, not confined to a single shape
but able to assume the shape and volume of its container."
JT: This is a book with a very wide scope: it seems as if you’ve tackled everything in sight about your mother’s death and the years around it. Was this a “project book” from the get-go, or did the project only reveal itself later in the process of putting together the manuscript? At which point did the book’s “project” become clear?
JQ: Definitely the latter—I don’t think of this book as a “project book” necessarily, and truthfully, I didn’t know I was writing a book at all until I started assembling the poems. I don’t have an MFA or much formal training in poetry, and I wrote most of these poems while in grad school (for science). For most of that time, I didn’t know anything about writing as an industry, and I didn’t have any plans for the poems. I just needed to write them and find some way of connecting with other people in a desperately isolating and stressful period of my life. There are another hundred or so poems that didn’t make it into the book.
Once I began to assemble the poems into a collection, I think the “project” became clear in that I knew it needed to be a book about this period of my life that was so permeated by grief and growing up and grad school. The first section of the manuscript, in particular, didn’t change too much over time, but it took me a long time to know how to move forward, much as it did in real life.
JT: Parts I and II are also about the secrets held by your family: how did you realize you needed to tell the story of your family in order to tell the story of your mother’s passing?
JQ: I’m not sure that I ever consciously realized that and made that decision. I spent years sort of stuck in a state of complicated grief, more formally known as “persistent complex bereavement disorder” which is a clinical term defined by the Mayo Clinic as “painful emotions so long lasting and severe that you have trouble recovering from the loss.” And this grief was so deeply rooted in the dynamics of my family and how isolated I felt without my mother.
"I don’t know that cell biology ever offered me
language for grief. What it did offer was distraction…”
JT: I’m struck by how, in the book’s wide-ranging exploration, we stop for breaths in between poems, as if to be reminded that the pain is always here. It has never left. Where do you think poems can elucidate the experience of loss in ways that science cannot? Conversely, where do you think studying cell biology offers language for grief?
JQ: I don’t know that cell biology ever offered me language for grief. What it did offer was distraction because it was intellectually challenging and forced me to focus my mental energy on something other than my sense of loss.
JT: I’m thinking about the poems “Palmistry” and “Reading Horoscopes During a Long Convalescence”: in both, there’s a turn towards ways of thinking that neither you nor your mother previously believed in. What did loss teach you about spirituality?
JQ: At some point in childhood, I learned to pride myself on being stoic and logical, but there’s no logic to grief. Joan Didion wrote about this in The Year of Magical Thinking too. I think we choose to believe in certain things so that we can survive the pain of living.
JT: I noticed a sense of helplessness throughout the book: of studying cancer for years but not being able to eradicate it, to find a cure for your mother’s pain. What made you think about studying cancer in the wake of your mother’s passing?
JQ: I started out as a (reluctant) pre-med in college, and because of that I started doing research in a lab and enjoyed it more than I expected. What drew me to research rather than clinical work was also what drew me to poetry—the desire to understand things more deeply and make connections between seemingly disparate observations. In college, I also took a Cancer Biology class, and when my mother was sick, that class was one of my few comforts because I could focus all my efforts on understanding something that was difficult and feel like I was doing something useful.
JT: You researched cancer for years: when did you start writing poems? How old is the oldest poem in this manuscript?
JQ: I’ve actually been writing poems ever since I was a child and read William Blake’s “The Tyger” in the preface of a YA book about a transforming girl (something like off-brand Animorphs, I guess, though I don’t quite remember). I remember being drawn to the musicality of it. I took several creative writing classes in college, and there are a few poems in this manuscript that I wrote in my last college workshop and published way back in 2010.
"... there’s no logic to grief.”
JT: “Habits” is one of my favorite poems from the book, because of how deftly you tie brain cells into a rumination on repetition and muscle memory. There are metaphors from cell biology scattered throughout the book, and I wonder how often that happens in your own research. What points of intersection happen naturally for you, and which take more thought and time?
JQ: Thank you. I should mention that I don’t do research anymore, at least not in a lab. I never really intentionally incorporated my scientific work into my poems, so when it did appear, it usually came about organically. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t take thought and time, given how much time I spent thinking and learning about cell biology for so many years.
JT: Thinking about the poem “Commonalities,” I have to ask: do you think loss and grief, in some aspects, connect those who have experienced it?
JQ: I do to some extent. Even though I don’t think any two people experience loss in the same way, it’s a comfort to know that someone kind of gets it. I often think about Emily Dickinson’s poem “I measure every grief I meet” and the different “sizes” of grief she describes, but at the end of the poem, she writes “Still fascinated to presume / That Some – are like my own –”
JT: How do you think about memory in this book? How did you build memory, and the act of remembering your mother, into the fabric of Focal Point?
JQ: I couldn’t not remember my mother, even when I tried, but remembering was too painful, and so I put those painful, beautiful memories to paper. In Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” another poem I adore, she writes, “You remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. // Why hold onto all that? And I said, / Where can I put it down?” For me, the answer was these poems that eventually became Focal Point.
JT: I think about the final gesture of Marie Howe’s What the Living Do a lot: “I am living. I remember you.” I see that same gesture in the poem “First Spring, 2020,” which is toward the end of the book. Do you see Focal Point belonging to any traditions? What books did you lean on in the making of this one?
JQ: I love Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, and it was not only one of the books I leaned on but also one of the first contemporary poetry collections I read. I acknowledge that poem and collection in the notes as the inspiration for “Postcards from the Living,” though that might be less apparent in its current iteration. Other poems and books I found and loved when I needed them: Rose McLarney’s “Gather” from The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, Nellie Wong’s “Mama, Come Back,” Natasha Tretheway’s “Myth,” Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Cheryl Strayed’s Torch (and all of her books, really), Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, Lucille Lang Day’s Wild One, Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things, and so many more, too many to name.
Janelle Tan was born in Singapore. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, No Tokens, The Margins (AAWW), and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from NYU, and is the Assistant Interviews Editor at Singapore Unbound. She lives and teaches poetry in Brooklyn.
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