CINDY JUYOUNG OK INTERVIEW WARD TOWARD

Cindy Juyoung Ok is a writer, editor, and professor of poetry. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, was published by Yale University Press as a part of the institution’s Series of Younger Poets. She has also translated The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon.

Interview by Isabelle Sakelaris

Some of the poems have a few references to comedy, notably “Three Act Comedy” and “Laugh Track.” In these, you point out that the genre—dramatic comedy or sitcom, as the case may be—is formulaic and requires a happy ending (or at least, not a sad one). What forms in poetry are most useful to you, and which are the least? Did the idea of exploring comedy and humor develop throughout writing the book, or did you know you were interested in it at the start?

I didn’t set out to consider comedy (or anything else), but a third poem in the book was originally called “Romantic Comedy.” Forms, including of poetry, can be comforting and complicating—like characterizing sitcom endings as happy. Seinfeld has endings neither happy or sad, but which invite more story, and tease the aliveness of the characters and their interactions between weeks. There isn’t some final Shakespearean wedding scene of music, dance, and relief, but that’s its own formula.

Some of the poems in Ward Toward take up language issues as constraining since it is representational. For example, in “It Is Like,” you wrote, “The metaphors for panic dissatisfy me…It refuses, / I promise, all language and requires / the ruination of the self, of narration” (44). Would you please tell us about your approach to writing about experiences you feel are impossible to impart with words, such as panic? How do you reconcile the limitations of language with the desire to make art with it? Or do you find the limitations generative?

I don’t have any conscious approach to writing, and don’t find failings and desires around language to be contradictory or require reconciliation. A world in which language describes perfectly or totally is not possible, but I would not want this world anyway.

When grieving a death, at first the impossibility of not touching or hearing the loved one’s body is frustrating and may repeat in thought. After a while, that you won’t is less conscious because it’s a premise of your life, which seems the same to others but feels, for you, radically altered. Thinking about not interacting with a dead person becomes a choice or saved for panic, like thinking about breathing. When first learning that language is not whole or inherent or perfect, perhaps there is a sense of loss, but soon after, it’s another premise. Loving language requires loving what is already dead.

How did you start writing the concrete poems, like “Home Ward?” Do you think you will explore other forms of visual poetry in future works?

All poetry is, in a way, visual poetry and in many languages, there is meaning in how words look; spatially diagrammatic language is rarer or different in English. I began poems like “Home Ward” like any poem, on pads of paper. What I notice about language orbits spelling and margins so I imagine the spatial responsibility of language will always be close.

In many of the poems in Ward Toward, you explore how gaps in traits, attitudes, and values are marked in language. In the poems “P.S. Please Forgive Poor Grammar” and “How Is Temperature in East?” you “ruptured and remade” emails you had received from your mother, with her consent. What was it like transforming her words in your poems? Was it any different than “Ten Sessions,” for which you used your therapist’s notes (also with permission)?

One difference was in my emotional response to the source text. I read and found new readings of the therapy notes with clinical clarity (liking being referred to as “Client”) as blanking out words rearranged meaning. The emails for the two other poems were so affecting, their language. There was little I transformed but the context in those two: one is most of the text of a single email to which I added line breaks; the other gathers lines from many emails from over two years.

The term “narrative prosthesis” describes treating disability as a plot device in literature, which some critics argue diminish the importance of disability representation, awareness, and understanding. Your work offers a fuller view of depression—how it affects the speaker’s life, experiences, and relationships, as well as a critique of attitudes surrounding patients in treatment. For example, in “Fissured” the speaker wonders, “If I’m not feeling / my pain, then who or what is the me in my?” (13). Did you feel any sort of responsibility or pressure to write about your experience with depression and hospitalization a certain way? How did you respond to it? What advice do you have for artists who face certain expectations or stigma because of an identity or experience they hold?

The only plots of the poems are the physical ones the stanzas resemble, small wards along the page like vegetable rows or grave sequences. Plots can simultaneously enact death and life, both sameness and invention. The book doesn’t aim or claim to be an account or example and tends anti-journalistic, anti-sentence.

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Isabelle Sakelaris is an art writer and aspiring poet who lives and works in New York City.

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