An Interview with Franny Choi
Landis Grenville
Franny Choi is the author of three collections of poetry, including The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Franny is the current Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA and the founder of Brew & Forge. They have two books forthcoming: a collection of essays about robots, and an anthology, We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word, co-edited with Terisa Siagatonu, No‘u Revilla, and Bao Phi. Franny is Faculty in Literature at Bennington College.
With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time—from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. These poems explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. As she wrestles with the daily griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness—between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest—could look like. Bringing together Choi's signature speculative imagination with even greater musicality than her previous work, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On ultimately charts new paths toward hope in the aftermaths, and visions for our collective survival.
– HarperCollins Publishing Group
You can purchase Franny Choi’s most recent collection The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On here.
Landis Grenville: Terrance Hayes talks about choosing the sonnet for his collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, which, similar to your work, engages the racial and social violences of our age through the personal, and says that he chose the sonnet as the form of critique because it is a love poem. Of course, the sonnet has a long history in protest and political poetry alongside its tradition as a love poem and a poem of prayer. There is so much tenderness in your work, so much touch and intimacy even as the poems respond to problems of empire. Can you talk about the role of love/tenderness in your poetics? Perhaps how it appears in each collection or how it appears for you in your own relationship to writing and critique.
Franny Choi: Since I was a baby-queer in movement spaces, I’ve been, for better or for worse, drawn to that quote by Che Guevara: “Let me say, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is driven by strong feelings of love.” This operates for me as something like an antidote, or maybe an emotional counterweight, to the ways that critique can drain me. It can be sort of a bummer to spend all of one’s professional hours describing, with as much rigor and precision as possible, the horrors of the world. Grounding myself in love—for my friends, for my imagined reader, for the disparate groups I claim as my people, for the creative process—helps me remember what it’s all for. Honestly, it helps me stay (at least a little) sane. And it helps me remember to keep care at the center; to never privilege an opportunity for critique over my responsibilities to the real and vulnerable human on the other side of the poem. I think this is part of the reason (though I may not have realized it at the time) that The World Keeps Ending is so musical: given how difficult and despairing the content can be at times, I wanted to privilege the pleasures of sound and meter, to create a sonics of care in the environments of the poems themselves, so that a reader might take some solace in the poems alongside the shittiness of their confrontations.
As cynical as I can sometimes be in my suspicions about the valorization of tenderness, I also think it makes me a better thinker. Maybe other people do their best thinking from a defensive crouch, but I don’t. I have to let myself become a little soft in order to really get to the thing underneath the thing. I feel indebted to queer theorists like Eve Sedgwick and José Esteban Muñoz in doing this thinking: about what might be possible when we don’t take up a paranoid, defensive intellectual stance against the discourses and images intent on hurting us, but allow ourselves the grace of turning toward those with something like a reparative lens.
I wanted to privilege the pleasures of sound and meter, to create a sonics of care in the environments of the poems themselves, so that a reader might take some solace in the poems alongside the shittiness of their confrontations.
LG: In an interview, you talk about how you wrote a poem about an experience your mother had with American policing, i.e. the police state and her resistance to having that story out there in the world that ultimately led you to take that poem out of the collection. Your poem “Poem in Place of a Poem” is that placeholder and nod to that silence. Throughout your work, you tell many stories from the life of the speaker, from family, from beloveds, and from histories of empire and violation across time and location—protests in America, 9/11, America’s war in Korea, the atom bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Can you talk about how you approach the ethics of telling these stories of others? How do you navigate poetry as an act of witness with a respect for the complexities of other lives, experiences, and voices?
FC: I confess I have at times felt suspicious of the framework of witness. I feel uncomfortable about the ways that this idea of the “political poet” as witness sets up the platformed (i.e., privileged) outsider as the one with the power to narrate the truth—particularly, the truth of harm against another population. I feel uncomfortable with the ways this casts some people as recipients of harm, and others as brave documenters, and how this might serve to humanize the poet more than the communities they’re writing “about.” Capital, of course, makes this all the more egregious; the trouble of getting gigs and publishing deals for describing other people’s suffering, ick.
And yet: how can any of us possibly think that the best and only thing to do is to tell our own stories? It would be weird to write a book that has the word “world” twice in the title and then to write only about the struggles of middle-class, Korean American queers. Every struggle needs its allies; the worldwide protests against the genocide in Gaza is only the latest example of this. I don’t have any clear answers about how to weigh the need for solidarity with the pitfalls of speaking for others. Each of us is personally connected to the struggles of others. So, the only way for me to write about settler colonialism on Turtle Island and in Palestine, about police violence against Black people, about corporate assaults on the climate, is to bring the full, flawed truth of my disgustingly specific emotional experience to the poem—and to be absolutely ruthless in my commitments to all of our liberation in the process.
I don’t have any clear answers about how to weigh the need for solidarity with the pitfalls of speaking for others. Each of us is personally connected to the struggles of others.
LG: In reading your collections, I was thinking about how you return and return to obsessions—something all poets do—, but also how that act of returning occurs in the repetitions of the books—the character of the cyborg in Soft Science, the Q&A structures, the anaphora of “before the apocalypse” in the title poem of The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On or the poem “Science Fiction Poetry” with its repetition of dystopia. These explicit anaphoras and acts of repetition feel integral to a poetics of social commentary—I’m thinking Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” or Allen Ginsberg’s “America” or “Howl.” Can you speak to what repetition—anaphora or returning to images of obsession or repeating one’s own language—reveals about engaging violences? Does repetition feel like a necessary form for the mind/voice when grappling with traumas? Or maybe where this comes from as a craft choice for you?
FC: I love this question, and I love the connections you’re making to Celan and Ginsberg! I think anaphora is a key technique of poetry that’s closely linked to performance, maybe partly because that sort of repetition is quite orienting if you’re mostly experiencing a poem aurally. If you only get one shot to hear and experience/understand a poem, you can use all the scaffolding you can get—and having a word repeated at the beginning of the line makes for a really clear pattern. You see it employed all the time in slam poems and in Beat poetry and the Black Arts movement. Maybe this is also why forms like the ghazal, which have strong links to the oral tradition, employ repetition and rhyme at the ends of verses. There is also a liturgical quality to the repeated word or phrase, isn’t there?—a sense that for language to bring a reality into being, it needs to be not only descriptive but also ritualistic, which is to say repeated. It’s almost not the meaning, but the repetition itself that gives the spell or prayer its power. I’m really interested in the connection between this and a poetics of social commentary! Maybe it has to do with the knowledge that one is always speaking to a broad we; that we imagine lots of people in a room with us and imagine that our poems might need to travel beyond the page to reach people. I’m thinking about the poems of Anna Akhmatova, how they could only exist in the world by being memorized by friends. But also, maybe it’s purely an aesthetic inheritance from particular traditions of poetry that have been tagged, sometimes retroactively, as “political.”
LG: Elsewhere, talking about Soft Science, you mentioned that some of the early poems that began the book were poems considering the character and voice/voicelessness of Kyoko from Ex Machina. You called these—I think quoting from Danez Smith—your “bay leaf poems” because, ultimately, most didn’t make it into the collection in their original form. For For The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, was there a “bay leaf” poem or story that helped you find the arc or shape of this book? If not, can you talk about the genesis poem(s) that told you “Oh this is what I’m doing, this is what I want to explore”?
FC Yes! (First of all, this is one of my favorite Danez-isms, and I’m so happy that the idea of the bay leaf poem has kept circulating.) The first version of this manuscript was a “Korea book,” or at least that was the sort of ham-handed shorthand I used for it. Before and during the writing of Soft Science, I was also writing poems about Koreanness, some of which addressed the war and others of which were narrated through the vector of my own, smaller interactions with questions of identity and erasure. A poem of mine called “Choi Jeong Min,” about no longer going by my Korean name, was one of those that anchored that early version of the manuscript. As the collection developed into one that drew connections between what I understood as “Koreanness” and contemporary American concerns about war, climate, and militarized borders, those earlier poems no longer had a place in the book; as happened with Soft Science, the book sort of outgrew them. But they have their own lives in the world (by being published in journals and things), and in my heart (I do love that poem, and I especially love how it connects me to a lineage of Asian American poets writing about naming, like Marilyn Chin’s poem “How I Got That Name”).
LG: Do you have any superstitions or rituals around writing? Like you write between these hours, or you always wear overalls, etc.? If not, maybe some things that help you to start writing or help when you’re feeling stuck?
FC: I try to surprise myself as much as possible when writing. For me, writing feels most like writing when it’s at least somewhat improvisational. I read recently that Gertrude Stein, while discussing automatic writing, called genius the ability to both write without thinking and, at the same time, watch oneself writing. I would certainly never feel comfortable using a word like “genius” to describe my writing(!), but I would say that writing feels most alive to me when I’m just as invested in discovering what emerges as I am in trying to faithfully convey something like truth, or inner experience—when I’m able to be attentive to both of these impulses at once. Things are going best when I can think about myself and the poem as being in collaboration, rather than me as The Author standing sovereign over the work or whatever.
It’s weirdly hard to put myself in a condition in which I surprise myself—maybe I’m too much of a control freak about my output most of the time and spend too much energy wanting to seem smart or cool or deep! I have a few strategies I use for sneaking around that hyper-controlling, editor brain. Writing by hand is one (I have very messy handwriting). Writing when very sleepy or otherwise a little incapacitated is another, though the latter is not very sustainable. Using a received form also helps, because the rules give me something I’m forced to work around, even fight against. My favorite method of this sort is a kind of automatic writing (I guess I’m indebted to Stein after all, oh well), wherein I write nonstop without looking at what I’m writing, usually with some kind of loud sound playing in my headphones, music with lots of lyrics, or news headlines, or a recording of someone reading a poem. A few times, when I was feeling really stuck, I’ve typed in a Word document after changing the font color to white, so there’s no chance at all that I can look down and judge what I’ve written. Weird, but I swear it helps!
I would certainly never feel comfortable using a word like “genius” to describe my writing(!), but I would say that writing feels most alive to me when I’m just as invested in discovering what emerges as I am in trying to faithfully convey something like truth, or inner experience—when I’m able to be attentive to both of these impulses at once
LG: In addition to being a poet, you write creative nonfiction. I loved your nine-part series on menstruation, and also your contemplation of language and family in “Imitation Games.” What has it been like exploring some of these same topics you explore in poetry—gender, family, queerness, etc.—in prose? Can you talk a little about your journey into creative nonfiction from poetry?
FC: Oh, thank you so much for reading the menstruation column! I feel super grateful to the folks at Palette Poetry, and I also figured that the journal was (though wonderful) so small that no one would really read it, which was freeing for my own ability to experiment! (A column that I write every month on my period! Is this what people mean when they talk about occasional writing?) I loved having that space to sort of get my reps in vis-à-vis nonfiction and explore the form without much scrutiny—but I’m also so happy that at least a few folks read it, my funny little thoughts!
Anyway, I’ve been interested in nonfiction forms for a while, partly because of the few years I spent editing and writing for the News, Politics, and Social Justice section of Hyphen, an Asian American magazine. I loved researching and interviewing people for pieces, and I loved helping other writers develop the thoughts in their pieces. I’ve long been excited by feminist writers whose work straddles poetry and prose, people like Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine and Bhanu Kapil. I like how the lyric becomes one element among many in that realm—a lever you can pull to create resonance, connection, or emotional texture in the midst of thought. I started writing this collection of essays about robots and cyborgs because, simply put, I wasn’t done thinking about them yet. The entanglements between race, gender, intimacy, and artificial life felt so difficult and fraught, that poetry was my only way in, at first. It’s a flexible art form, one that’s not only not afraid of contradiction, but almost requires it; the impossibility of description almost is the engine, at least for me. So, that was how Soft Science came about—but then, over the next few years, I kept learning more about robots, cyborgs, and AI, and how these interacted with the phenomenon known as techno-Orientalism (the close association between Asian people and hyper-developed technology). People kept sending me news stories. Poetry had allowed me to needle my way into these fraught associations, but once I was there, I wanted to really think about them, in a way you can only do with a longer form built around contending with facts and conceptual grappling. Simply put, there was lots of stuff there. The funny thing is that, once I started trying to grapple with it all in logical, respectable prose, it turned out I really needed to lean back on the kinds of mystery and unknowing that a more lyric mode allowed. I keep having to relearn everything I’d gotten used to in poetry: how to resist predicting the ending, how to privilege honesty over “sounding good,” how to write drafts without the pressure of producing “usable” content. Getting the chance to reenter these themes and topics with that kind of beginner mindset has been a real blessing, honestly.
Landis Grenville holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a fifth year PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Her recent poetry has appeared in Michigan Quarterly, Iowa review, and elsewhere.