Angela Veronica Wong, December 2011

Angela Veronica Wong‘s Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter was selected by Bob Hicok as a winner of the 2011 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship.  She is also the author of five other chapbooks, including a forthcoming e-chapbook on YesYes Books. Her first full-length collection of poems is entitled how to survive a hotel fire and is forthcoming from Coconut Books in Spring 2012. She is on the internet at www.angelaveronicawong.com.

Redivider: Most people are comfortable with the idea of a spirit animal or power animal–but who is your spirit poet/power poet?

Angela Veronica Wong: I’m not sure I’m defining spirit poet correctly, but there are so many poets who have guided me, changed me, informed my understanding of language – I love that I continue to be surprised, envious, and inspired by the things that other writers do with words. Barbara Guest and Myung Mi Kim come to mind; Anne Carson and Gertrude Stein; or Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Marguerite Duras, because these are writers who question and push boundaries and are unapologetic and fearless. But I think my gut answer would be Sylvia Plath, whose control of line, language, and the performance within poetry is something that I will always be in awe of. Her poems are simultaneously managed and calculated but so explosive in emotionality and tone – it’s such a remarkably difficult balance to achieve.

R: Your poems to appear in Redivider 9.1 seem to exist without a specific location but I’ve found in some of your other poems (like here: http://www.vinylpoetry.org/volume-2/angela-veronica-wong/ for instance) New York is, if not the star, a leading lady.  How does your relationship with New York (or location in general) interact with your poetry?

AVW: The concreteness of a determined place, a location, in the poems I write is a bit of a new development for me. I feel like in the past I’ve written much more abstractly about place.

To directly address New York, it’s this strange, magnificent place that you become involved with in some way, especially after you’ve lived here for a while. It’s wonderful and thrilling and cruel and extravagant and exhausting and painful to live in New York City.

I do love the busyness of the city. It challenges my brain and presents me with small, beautiful things every single day. Still though, it’s a city where you are constantly negotiating the duality of visibility and invisibility, where you can constantly have millions of bodies swirling around yours, but it can be incredibly isolating.

I love, also, to know other people’s reaction and understanding of New York – I love how every person’s New York is different, how I can meet someone on the other side of the world who lived in New York at the same time I did, but experienced and loved and lived a completely different life.

As for the poems in Redivider 9.1, I can see why they seem to exist without a specific location, but they are very much derived from one place. The poems are an excerpt from a longer series, and a majority of the lines were written when I visited Green Island (綠島) for three days this past April. The series itself was put together within days of returning from the trip.

Green Island is a small island off the eastern coast of Taiwan and it was used to hold political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period. It is a beautiful island and now is known as a great diving and snorkeling site. When I went – perhaps it was because it was a weekday and moody weather, so there weren’t a lot of people around – I could still feel its lingering history, especially as we walked through the old prison grounds. The island is never mentioned by name during the series, but I hope the reader gets from the poems the setting of ocean and beach in the context of isolation and change, of things that are uncontrollable, of that feeling of missing someone or something.

R: What would you say are some of your crucial or keywords in your vocabulary inventory?  Also, which words excite you (perhaps words that you have not yet used in your work but are trying to find ways to bring them in)?

AVW: This question makes me think about writerly obsessions-we all have them, words or themes. It is revealing (and sometimes embarrassing) to realize how and what things are repeated and whether that changes or evolves. I write a lot of serial poems, which tends to magnify obsession.

My first full-length collection is being published by Coconut Books in the spring, and because all but one poem were written in a six-month span, I can really see the patterning. For this collection in particular, images and words that repeat include: the water and ocean; make-up (mascara, specifically) and hair; articles of clothing; beds; and a lot of things that have to do with the kitchen. But these words repeatedly appear because to me they represent a lot of “larger” themes: the presentation and interpretation of identity, the physical body and the intersection of public space and intimacy, gender and domesticity.

I recently completed a collaborative chapbook with a friend (and awesome poet), Steven Karl, which will be published by Lame House Press in February 2012. I bring this up because it was really fun to work with someone else’s words and obsessions and to see how someone works with yours. I remember a mutual friend (the fabulous poet Amy Lawless) telling me about Steven reading one of the poems and saying, “I could tell it was it was from your collaborative poems because there was such a Veronica word in there.” I love that! Similarly, Steven has some wonderful poems on grapefruits, and one of my poems from the chapbook has the word grapefruit, which came about rather organically, but as soon as I wrote the word, I thought of his poems.

As for words that excite me, that is harder to answer. I do make a note of words, particularly ones I like the sounds of, but I tend more to work with lines or ideas. For the past year, I’ve been really into writing poems for a title – if I think something would make a great title of a poem, I’ll write that down to play with. For example, I walked past a music store in Atlanta recently with crates of old records out front and saw one that said: “88 lines about 44 women.” I think that would make such an amazing poem!

Incidentally, the full-length is entitled how to survive a hotel fire and features about forty poems on how to survive a hotel fire. This is just me admitting that I’m prone to obsession.

R: Can you talk more about your process for writing collaborative poems–such as, how do you begin and then how to you proceed?

I think each collaboration works (and each set of collaborators work) differently. The collaboration I refer to earlier (with Steven Karl) came about simply – I don’t even think we knew it was “a collaboration” until it was finished. Basically, I sent him a poem just to look over, and he responded with a poem of his own. I wrote one back, and we kept doing that until we stopped.

Ending the series was somewhat intuitive and somewhat situational – we realized we had enough poems for a chapbook and there was a deadline for a contest coming up. Like I said, there was never a structure imposed on this collaboration (other than the back-and-forth), so I suppose we could’ve just kept going, but it did feel like a good endpoint. We then went through and made edits to our own poems, considered the poem order, came up with a title and sent it out.

Other collaborations I have worked/am working on are higher concept – as in, there is a chosen theme and then poems are written to fit that theme, but usually there is still a bit of a back-and-forth. And I’m currently working on a novel in which the chapters are alternate because it is told through two characters.

Some collaborations are a bit looser, more like an exchange of words/language/ideas than exchanging poems, with idea that we will shape things later.

I enjoy what is produced out of any collaboration, even if it becomes only an exercise or doesn’t “go anywhere” in the sense of publications. It is, in a sense, stretching, asking yourself to enter into unknown spaces. But it also allows for writing to become a social activity – and it gives you this insight into someone else’s process, someone else’s language, which I always find beneficial to my writing.

R: What’s your favorite poem you’ve written based on a title you found/created and what makes it your favorite?

AVW: A majority of the poems in the forthcoming book falls within that category – as I said, I wrote about 40 poems with the title (or some variation of)”HOW TO SURVIVE A HOTEL FIRE.” But because I went into writing the Hotel Fire poems knowing they would be a series (I don’t always), it’s hard for me to take them completely out of context. In other words, it’s hard for me to evaluate them without the knowledge of how they work against the other poems. I do have Hotel Fire poems I like better than others, but that often changes based on how I’m feeling or what I wearing, and it feels unfair to call them out.

Many of the poems I contributed to the Lame House Press chapbook (the forthcoming collaboration) were written that way as well, in that I would steal a line from Steven’s poem and start from there.

And in a way the poems in Redivider and the series from which they were taken were also written in that manner – I decided on the title early in its construction, and then ended up forming the poems. I think the actual words had already been written down, they weren’t poems yet. If that makes sense.

All of this is just saying that I don’t know if I can answer that question! But the REDIVIDER poems and that series is really close to my heart for a variety of reasons, so if forced to choose, I would have to say that series. I’m not sucking up to you guys, I actually do just like those poems.

R: What can we look forward to in the future world of Angela Veronica Wong? You mentioned your book on Coconut but anything else you’d like to direct us to, mention, emphasize, etc?

AVW: I am so fortunate to have a few projects coming into fruition in 2012. The major one, of course, is the full-length collection how to survive a hotel fire on Coconut Books, which is this fantastic press with an amazingly thoughtful, smart and kind editor, Bruce Covey. I’m not positive when the book will be available to pre-order (hopefully by February 2012) but it will be officially out in the Spring, and you should check out all the other amazing books available on Coconut: http://www.coconutpoetry.org/books1

If you can’t wait until then to find out how to survive a hotel fire, Katherine Sullivan and the great people at YesYes Books will be putting out an e-chapbook of some of the Hotel Fire poems in the next month or so. She publishes some enviously talented writers, and I’m flattered to be included with the group. (Check it out here.)

I am also working on this super-fun young adult novel with a good friend and writer Reinhardt Suarez. It doesn’t have a home yet, but we are looking for one and I’m so excited for its possibilities. (Reinhardt probably hates me because I’m always bugging him to get me his next chapter, but I just have to know what happens to his character!)

There are some other things brewing as well, which I will share with the whole world on the internet on www.angelaveronicawong.com. But more importantly, I want to read more. I want to collaborate more. I want to go to libraries more. I want to talk to my friends more. I want to cook more. I think I want to be on Twitter-less. I know I want to travel more. I suppose that is more what I am looking forward to in the future.