Jessica Q. Stark is a mixed-race, Vietnamese poet originally from California. She
is a doctoral candidate in English at Duke University where she writes on the
intersections of American poetry and comic books. She is the author of three
poetry chapbooks, the latest titled Vasilisat he Wise (Ethel Zine Press, 2018). Her chapbook manuscript, The Liminal Parade, was selected by
Dorothea Lasky for Heavy Feather's
Double Take Poetry Prize in 2016. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in
Pleiades, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart,
Tupelo Quarterly, Potluck, Glass Poetry Journal, and others. Her first full-length poetry
collection, Savage Pageant, is
forthcoming with Birds, LLC. She writes an ongoing poetry zine called INNANET. She is an Assistant Poetry Editor
for AGNI.
1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does
your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My first chapbook was called The Liminal Parade, which like my first
full-length book, is a hybrid text. I juxtaposed illustrations of Britney
Spears crying on YouTube, scenes from the World’s Fair in 1904, and poems about
exposure. I was in a socially disappointed place, and I just went for silly and
bizarre because that’s where I felt like I lived at the time and that’s where
so many people live. The Internet is bizarre, we are bizarre, how we view
ourselves and each other through the Internet is bizarre. So it had to be a
wild text, and that is where I have continually written from with my work. I
think the first chapbook was formative in first training my mind to think in
book-form. I felt a distinct shift in how I write after that text. I used to
want to write one good poem. Now I work in patterns: denouement, apex,
liminality, boredom, accumulation—these are all things that are important to me
in designing poems in constellation with other poems. In thinking about how
they fit in a larger narrative—both on the page and historically.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction
or non-fiction?
Oh, but I didn’t. I wrote my first
published pieces under a pseudonym and they were humor short stories. They
involved a lot of hiding. I love humor in real life—it’s how we stay alive, isn’t
it? Agony as humor, humor as bravado. But I crawled into poetry as a place for
looking hard into the dark little corners. When I read books by Bhanu Kapil and
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, they
had a profound effect on the truth for me. I was interested in being more
truthful and I think that poetry’s boundlessness allows for a great deal of
magic in truly staying alive and, perhaps, uncovered.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?
Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first
drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of
copious notes?
I think about writing projects a lot
before I sit down to write. I write a lot of notes on my phone and a lot of my
work has come from research. I’ve had the privilege to spend large swaths of my
life in libraries, archives. I work at Duke University’s Rubenstein rare books library right now. Naturally, my interest piques from certain materials and I
think for a long time about how pieces speak to one another—especially
combinations that aren’t typically thought of as in dialogue. Right now, I’m
thinking about the gendered history of bodily pain with my friend and poet Lauren
Hunter, which was influenced by our similarly strange sources of nerve pain and
my experience thumbing through the artifacts from the history of women’s
medicine archives. For another manuscript I’m working on called Buffalo Girl, I’m researching the oral
history of Little Red Riding Hood in juxtaposition to stories from my mother
who immigrated to the US from Vietnam in 1975. The thinking of these projects
is generally slow, and the process is respectively quick. I like to write
manuscripts in stolen chunks of time (six months or less) when I’ve arrived in my
mind to what it will resemble.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of
short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on
a "book" from the very beginning?
These days, to keep my mind on good
behavior, I work on “books.” Like I mentioned, I used to want to write one
“good poem.” As if life is ever a good poem. I want books to resemble something
more chaotic and honest about how we make little homes out of raw material and
misinformation. I’d like some of the seams to show and that’s why I write for
long-form texts.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative
process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy attending readings and
hearing people read immensely, but I have never been the writer that enjoys
performing. Which seems funny because I’ve hosted a reading series for half of
a decade. I put a lot of stakes in performance and it takes a bit of my heart
to perform. I have read dozens of times and I do not get nervous anymore, but
it still is something that I give myself to in ways that are occasionally
exhausting. And there’s always a bad performance. No matter how prepared you
are. Once, I read in a crowded bar with half of the bar talking at high volume
at the same time while I was reading. I could barely hear myself; loud laughter
during inopportune lines. I always joke that poets know at least *a little* bit
what it would feel like to be bad comedian. Stuff of nightmares.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What
kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even
think the current questions are?
Goodness, yes. My forthcoming book
with Birds, LLC, Savage Pageant,
explores the concept of spectacle in relation to the varying forms of enfolding
violence throughout US history. I’m curious about who gets to call what a
spectacle? How do we treat forms of spectacle? How have I been a spectacle?
What’s the relationship between telling stories and ignoring ecological
collapse? How does spectacle erase or revise unsettling histories? What’s the
relationship between the exploitation of animals and how we view the maternal
body? I want to say that the answers to these questions and our national
history manifest illnesses that we do not necessarily understand, cannot see,
and will not yet describe. I names it psychogenic illness, but that is a
historical and linguistic container for what I do not know either. It also
involves a zoo, which is a metaphor for absolutely everything.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger
culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer
should be?
Writers, especially poets right now, in
my mind have a deep responsibility to act as a guard, a nervous ward, against
injustice. We need urgency, we need disruption, we need unsettling perspectives
and rude juxtapositions in order to jog us into activity, attention. Everything
starts and ends with language. Writers must wield that energy as they would a
very sharp knife: with confidence and deference for the blade’s potential
violence.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor
difficult or essential (or both)?
With a good match, working with an
outside editor is absolutely essential. Chris Tonelli from Birds, LLC has been
wonderful to work with in terms of shaping Savage
Pageant and bringing light to places in the manuscript that were otherwise
obscured or underdeveloped or hiding in plain sight. His attention was critical
to the final cuts and development of the book. A good editor is at best a
mirror and at worst, a thoughtful adversary. A bad editor is always a
disdainful critic. I’ve had my time with both. Run like hell from the latter.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily
given to you directly)?
Learn to write anywhere. I had a
teacher in undergrad assign me to write a poem on the school bus that made a
circle around campus. I had to turn in what I wrote on my phones at the end of
the cycle. I assign this same exercise in my workshops. I’m a mom to a young
toddler. I write anywhere I have the time. I’ve written poems waiting in
doctor’s offices, in parking lots while my son naps, in the gym on a locker
bench. Once you’ve gotten over the block that you need to be using this tool or
in this mindset or in this particular room, it becomes quite freeing to know
that you can always be creating in some sense. Between my job, my PhD, my son,
and my life-life, I don’t have a lot of “creative boredom.” Knowing how to
create in fleeting, rote moments fills me with joy and it’s a skill that I’ve
honed, in order to survive as an artist and to keep writing.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry
to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I move between poetry and prose in Savage Pageant and in my current books.
I use the term “poetry” as language that traverses these traditional
containers. Could I write a book of just prose, a novel? Probably. But I’m not
interested in holding the reigns on what poetry can do by moving back and forth
between genres. If you think about how people typically read on a day-to-day
basis, filled with screens, we are constantly shifting between genres and
reading modalities. I am reading the advertisements I don’t see when I check my
e-mail. I am reading images when I scroll through Twitter, Instagram. I’m
interested in having the printed page rise up to the challenge of speaking to
contemporary reading practices and how we might dismantle the everyday violence
of neglect and inattention.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you
even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I don’t tend towards routines, though
I wish I had a life and a habit to do so more frequently. I write creatively in
waves and usually fit it in around waged work or deadlines or childcare or
other obligations that fill up most of my time. I get it when and where I can.
Lots of coffee, too.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return
for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
The archive. Libraries hold so many
untold stories. I’m dedicated to the blood in the archive’s curation. I return
again and again to figure out what isn’t there, what needs attention. It never
fails to inspire imagination.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Incense and tiger balm. My mother is
Vietnamese and was raised Buddhist. My childhood involved attending a lot of my
relatives’ ceremonies and lots of pain masked by piquant balms.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but
are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music,
science or visual art?
My creative work is continually
influenced by different forms of research, which includes visual art, ideas in
science, music, and beyond. I have the privilege of being friends with a few
visual artists as well, particularly those who work in experimental
documentary—a field that directly overlaps in my mind with poetry. I also love
visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems, whose work is basically another form of
poetry. I’ve written an entire scholarly dissertation on poets that have used
comics and cartoon media in their poetic work during the twentieth century; I’m
fascinated with the barriers that we place on defining containers for art and
how artists continually complicate these projected boundaries. The Green Lantern in Amiri Baraka, Joe Brainard drawing Nancy comics. I don’t think these
attentions are one-offs or random. They’re incredibly informing of one another.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work,
or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m drawn recently to other hybrid
poets: Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of
is simply brilliant and so is Tina Chang’s Hybrida
as well as Rachel Zucker’s Soundmachine.
Since finishing my dissertation, I’ve been reading a lot of comics. I love Paper Girls by Image. I’ve been also
reading the biography of Madame Nhu by Monique Brinson Demery, which is
stunning in its portrait of one of Vietnam’s most complicated historical
“villains.”
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Take my son to Vietnam, own a dune
buggy, finish the book(s).
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would
it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you
not been a writer?
I’ve been told by two psychics that I
was a folk singer in another life, and I believe them.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
It came agonizingly to me in the
beginning—like a deep pull inside. The dishes in the sink that you know you got
to get around to. I don’t know—that’s the best way I can describe it. It’s less
that now and more joyful, even easy at times. I took a lot of big lecture
classes in English during my undergrad years at UC Berkeley a decade ago. In
one session, the whole lecture hall (over a hundred students) recited one of
Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s poems together. I think that was the moment. I was a
goner for the task of the word.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last
great film?
I’m late to the party with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. Hugely underrated.
It’s pure visual cake.
20 - What are you currently working on?
In addition to the Buffalo Girl manuscript and my
collaborative work, I’m always writing a poetry zine called INNANET. That project began as an experiment about three years ago
with writing a love poem for the Internet exclusively on my phone. I transfer
and print individual “volumes” from my phone logs and usually gift them or send
them to poets for free, especially poets that I’ve met on the Internet through
Twitter or other forms of social media. I love to hate the Internet, and it
hates to love me. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
No comments:
Post a Comment