SHIN YU PAI
A 2014 Stranger Genius Award nominee, Shin Yu Pai is the author of ten books of poetry. Her work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. Poems have been commissioned by the Dallas Museum of Art twice and her work is also featured in the Poetry-in-Motion Program sponsored by DART. She has been a featured presenter at national and international literary festivals including the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival and the Montreal Zen Poetry Festival.
Shin Yu’s visual work has been exhibited work at The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, The Paterson Museum, The American Jazz Museum, The Three Arts Club of Chicago, Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College Chicago, and the International Print Center. She is a member of the Mother Load collective.
Interview by Mackenzie Aker
Hi Shin Yu! I’m really excited to talk to you, could you start by telling us a bit about who you are and what you do?
I make things. Poems, books, photographs, performances, film. I have done so for twenty years. I am the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who grew up under Martial Law. I do not live on my ancestral lands. The diversity of my practice is as varied as the places where I have made my home — Boston, Chicago, Boulder, Dallas, Little Rock, Austin, Taipei, and Seattle. I grew up in a small working-class, mixed race unincorporated town (that remains unincorporated today) in the Inland Empire of Southern California — in the general region where Vince Gilligan almost originally set Breaking Bad.
I produce public programs that elevate conversations about poetry for the general public through my work with Town Hall Seattle and KUOW Public Radio. Previously, I worked as an experiences curator for Atlas Obscura, where I designed events that were imbued with the magic of poems. I have had many professions including museum educator and label writer, grantmaker, copyeditor, teacher, manuscript reader, small press publicist, and arts administrator and events producer. I am the mother to a seven-year-old boy and I am married to a practitioner of acupuncture and herbal medicine.
Can you tell us about your most recent publication Ensō? What was your intention with this project? This book is richly personal and I find your vulnerability courageous in describing the experiences that built you, your life, and your practice as it is today. What was your internal experience of making this book and why was this the right moment to publish it?
Ensō reflects twenty years of creative practice. I don’t always tell the stories behind the work that I make, and while audiences may know various aspects of my work, they may not necessarily have connected the dots of how these practices inform one another. I am generally a very private person. I grew up with overprotective parents and historically, I have been careful of sharing the more vulnerable parts of myself with the wider world. But being in my mid-forties now, I have learned that the greatest practice is to be vulnerable. To allow one’s self to be seen and to speak of things that once seemed unspeakable or at least better hidden. I cannot bury the things that have happened to me — whether that’s been displacement, sexism, racism, or often an intersectional combination of the last two. These things are part of my experience and I don’t have to feel shame about them or to downplay or minimize being a mother, which has deeply altered me.
Ensō, Entre Rios Books, 2020
Ensō sheds light on the structures of your artistic practice as a lifestyle and way of being in the world. What does this mean for you and what are your daily rhythms like?
My book is very much about creative practice as a whole and the notion of an artful life and how that can be expressed in the world. The way that we engage with the places where we live and how they not only shape our identity and experience but how we also constitute and participate in place-making is a large part of that expression, as well as communities of practice, artistic friendships, and how these conversations sustain a life and practice for the long haul.
My daily rhythms are deeply impacted by coronavirus and homeschooling a young child who may not fully understand these historic times in which we are living. My daily rhythm is running 2.5 miles every morning and attending to mind and body. On Wednesday nights, I practice with a Zen group. I have various projects in progress — a video poem that will travel to an international film festival, a limited edition handbound book with an audio component that awaits assembly…more than having a daily rhythm, I attend to projects and their emergent needs. I like to do a little reading before I go to bed. Mostly non-fiction memoir.
The design of Ensō feels very deliberate, as if the book is itself an interdisciplinary art object. How does the book’s final presentation reflect its themes and your practice?
I wanted to make a beautiful book full of images that also sings as an object. The book encompasses all areas of my creative practices, including audio works that readers download when they purchase a copy of the book. The images of ocean, landscape, and history are very important to this book. I will sometimes describe myself as a non-island island person. This is analogous to the notion of an urban Indian. I grew up disconnected from place, but places live within me. Including ancestral places, like the island where my parents grew up. Ensō is a continuum of time, place, and practice that continues to evolve. The title itself is a reference to the Zen circle of enlightenment of completion, a coming full circle that also signifies a lack of completion and a lack of perfection. There is the space inside the circle, the empty space that we must fill with our own imagining.
Interdisciplinarity beyond textual poetry is clearly an important aspect of your art practice through your work in bookmaking, performance, tea ceremony, and printmaking. How do these other disciplines affect or enrich your writing process? Are these also poetic practices for you?
There was a time long ago where things felt very separate. Photography vs. poem writing. Mothering vs. being an artist. Actually, all these things are poetic practices and aspects of the artful life. The content finds the form and expression. The form and expression sometimes facilitate the shape of the thing and help it to initially enter the world so that it can later inhabit the body that it needs to live within. Last year, I thought I was writing a poem that would take the shape of a film but was really meant to be embodied as a spoken performance with video projections, and at its very essence was an act of public ritual and ceremony. Practice is practice. It all slows down the mind and engages the heart/hands/body in new ways of looking and being. I’m not a dabbler. I learn new processes to understand something about how things are made and to therefore understand myself. To understand their vocabulary and capacity to communicate the poetic through wordless forms and silence.
Photo by James McDaniel
In Ensō you describe returning to forms like haiku and alphabet poems after giving birth to your son in 2013. What did these structures lend to your practice during this pivotal moment in your life?
Sometimes my work has had a tendency to be very mental and therefore not fully embodied. Simpler forms and everyday subjects felt relevant during my days of early motherhood. I was sleep-derived and had little mental energy to want to be philosophical or abstract or critical. Simple forms gave me access back to the immediacy of language and image and were what I had the mental space to contain at that time.
In the book you also write about systemic racism and microaggressions you have experienced as a Taiwanese-American woman, asking again and again “is it a hate crime?” Can we talk about your poem "Same Cloth" and the events that brought it into being? What was your process in making this object and why was a multimedia approach important for this piece?
I was poet laureate of a city outside of Seattle, where I live. A hate crime occurred. I felt there was a civic responsibility for me to use the platform as a public poet to say something to the community and to the victim about what had happened. This had echoes for me of a time when I lived in the South and personally experienced a hate crime, and ongoing harassment and stalking. At that time, it was not safe for me to be vocal or to push back. I responded to what happened by leaving the place where I lived. Law enforcement was not helpful in addressing the problem and only succeeded in further erasing my experience. Writing “Same Cloth” was an act of revising and revisiting, completing that experience. Of not gaslighting the self. Of looking with critical eyes at a horrific incident that left the victim’s life changed. Much like my own life was once changed.
Paper ends up in trash cans. People pick up flyers at the library and they end up in the recycling bin. I’m not naïve about this. Maybe you can letterpress print something and make it precious or labor-intensive, but the way in which poems communicate need to inhabit different bodies when it comes to a public experience. The piece was not meant to be widely printed and circulated. It’s a very personal and intimate poem, embroidered on cloth and handmade to evoke a very personal, non-mechanical, human experience. It is not embroidered on canvas, to suggest something besides the rough canvas of a KKK robe. It is made to be beautiful and fragile and ephemeral, even as the text expressed both tenderness, harm, and horror.
“Same Cloth”
What's coming up for you in the near future that you would like people to know about? Any new projects or writings?
My poetry film “Embarkation” will screen at the ZEBRA Poetry Festival in Berlin in November. I’m working with Editions Studio in Georgetown, Seattle to finish up a letterpress residency that resulted in the collaborative making of a small editioned book called Cloisters with artist Zeynep Alev. It has soshugi-bon wooden covers and laser etching, and it sings like a nightingale, attributable to a mechanical MP3 player embedded in the structure when opened. I’ve produced a poetry podcast all year long with Town Hall Seattle. We will release our last episode in December — a conversation with National Book Award winner Arthur Sze.
Buy Ensō
Check for updates and more information on Shin Yu’s site
Main page photo by Marc Perlish
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Mackenzie Aker is a Montreal-based writer who has worked as a curator, filmmaker and publishing editor. She holds a BFA in art history and film studies from Concordia University and her academic interests include museology, archaeology, and early documentary film. When not writing she spends her days reading in parks, drinking coffee, and listening to metal.
