Ruoyu: Ran, when reading your work, I felt as though I were holding something so delicately sacred in my hands—that to receive these poems was to witness a kind of fleeting intimacy that few could gain access to. In “Walking in the Slipstream” in particular, observations such as of “the past like / finding a skull in the creek that smells of nothing” and how it is “hard to remember how the falling feels / until you fall” seem to hint at larger, more devastating forces, that are, somehow, in this moment, unnameable. How do you navigate these moments that face the subtle periphery of threat, and how does fear work for you as an undercurrent in these spaces? 

Ran: It means a lot to have my words seen and held so intently, and I think the undertone of fear in “Slipstream” was very deliberate! In writing the poem, I was interested in hindsight: The knowledge that things will go wrong can fill a remembered moment with tension, even if the moment itself was cloudless. I wanted to juxtapose the clear, cloudless moment at the creek—simple joy, unshaded by hindsight—with a speaker who, looking back into the past, knows that danger is coming but is unable to give warning. 

In general, I think the fear in this poem comes from an abundance of care for people—in the past and present—whose fate you’re unable to alter. At some points while writing, I had my younger sibling in mind: it’s easy to fear for a child littler than you who needs to someday come face-to-face with many of the big things you’ve also stumbled through in growing up, and as a big sister, one inevitably realizes that advice is useless: whatever murky wisdom you’ve gleaned from going down thorny paths is not easily internalizable by this little child until she’s gone down the same paths, stumbled on the same stones, and formed her own beautifully robust, hard-won worldviews—and by then, any advice is too late. At some other points, I was also thinking about myself; I think there’s the tendency to wonder whether you would have made so many catastrophically stupid mistakes if someone had said the right thing to you at the right time. I used to always imagine myself going back in time with a single, perfectly crafted sentence to say to my younger self—for whom it’s very easy to imagine deserving of care—but the truth is, without walking the thorny path, it’s difficult to recognize the perfect sentence as something to be heeded.

Ruoyu: In so many of your poems, you focus on nature—the moon, various bodies of water, the animals we orbit around—and particularly the way we, as people, move through them. Whether this is through transformation, such as in “How to Turn Into the River” and “Carcinization,” or trying to access something through proximity, which you describe in “How did Li Bai die?”, what strikes me about your work is how closely your speakers/characters seem to exist with the settings around them. There lies a sense of longing and identity. In what ways are we, too, a changing part of the landscapes that so deeply shape us? What does it mean to return to them?

Ran: Again, I truly appreciate the care with which you read these poems! The way that poetry—in leaving certain things unsaid but in orbiting them tightly—brings us closer to truths too harsh and luminous for language to hold: that’s something I think about a lot in my work, and it means a lot that you spot it in “How did Li Bai Die?”! About setting: If my poems fixate on emotional landscapes that map to physical landscapes, I think it’s just because my own emotions are often tied to places. It feels that, in the same way a poem can act as a container for an emotion too vast, aching, or multifarious for a heart to easily hold, a setting holds so many visual and tactile triggers for remembered emotion that it becomes a container (or anchor?) for feelings too specific to conjure on your own. I hope it’s clear that I’m not speaking metaphorically: I think there are certain modes of self-understanding that you can only arrive at in particular physical spaces—and at least for me, going to an unfamiliar place defamiliarizes old emotions so sharply that I’m suddenly able to write about them. 

Ruoyu: I saw from your website that you created and judged a Young Poets Network writing competition titled “Write The Ordinary,” focused on illuminating the seemingly mundane moments in our lives. You recall Li-Young’s “Eating Together,” Kaveh Akbar’s “Learning to Pray,” and William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say,” among others. Because you’re so passionate about looking inwards during these everyday moments, I wanted to ask you about how you personally work at a sentence and line level to craft images. So many of our lives’ scenes aren’t necessarily inherently beautiful, or easy to draw beauty out of, but the way they are approached can grant them a tender, intimate glow. So what about a moment really matters? Which details? How do you discover it? How do you carefully cut away language so that the heart of the poem is able to pulse through? 

Ran: This is a beautifully worded question—I wish I had more substantial things to say! I appreciate the plain listing of small, incidental details, which I think is something Lee, Akbar, and Williams all do well, and something I try to do in my own work. I think they’re very humanizing—almost reflexively so—and the details a speaker fixates on reveal a lot about their state of mind. In “Story with a Dog”, I was fixated by the ability for these small details to humanize somebody you perhaps don’t wish to hold sympathy for, at least in your current state of being.

I also like thinking of my own poems as having their own color palettes—maybe it’s just a thing of enjoying visual art! I think that helps me make my images tonally cohesive. It also makes me really happy when I’m able to name a string of colors directly in a poem. It feels almost like a shorthand to beauty: unlike more complex images, a color is almost involuntarily imaginable; reading “the blue evening” immediately floods my mind with dim, wide dusk.

I think one could define poems as knots of unresolved tension: ideas are interesting when they are beautiful but don’t fall into easy, immediately predictable harmony. If I were to chip a poem’s language down to its core, I think the details and images remaining would need to be enough to maintain that tension.

Ruoyu: Could you tell me about one piece of art—this could be anything from other poems to TV show scripts—that has been deeply formative in creating the spaces your work exists in? In what ways does it continue to compel you towards new understandings?

Ran: There was a giant bilingual collection of Federico García Lorca’s poetry in my old school’s library, and I would flip through it whenever I wanted to wander off and be alone. I think his voice - at least in translation - has definitely colored mine, if I’m at liberty to say that about such a wonderful poet. And I don’t have a copy of Mary Ruefle’s “Madness, Rack, and Honey” with me, but it’s a collection of lectures on poetics, and she has a line that goes something like, “All our wants in life can be categorized as the need to be whetted and the need to be sated; we never realize they exist in opposition.” Maybe I’m paraphrasing this really badly, but that line - and that way of carving up desire - stayed in my head for a long time. It was interesting to me first because I was raised Buddhist, and it felt like a startlingly Buddhist sentiment: we’re stuck in cycles of suffering and discontent because of our attachment to earthly phenomena, which never exist with constancy. But as a child, I’d done all of my learning about Buddhism in Chinese, so to suddenly have an elegant, startlingly incisive way of thinking about Saṃsāra in modern, poetic English - it changed my approach to English poetry in a fundamental way. In my writing, it helped me articulate a lot of things to myself. ✺