OLGA MEXINA: This interview is focused on the major themes of your poetics: immigrant writing, memory and confabulation, and the relationship of form and content.

SAM CHA: Sure, sounds good. I will probably make a terrible clash of things.

OM: A conversation is a terrible clash. Let’s start with what immigrant writing is.

SC: I have been thinking about immigrant writing chiefly in terms of wondering and in terms of getting lost. On one level, I think that whenever we write, whenever we start to write – we are lost.

Dante, for example, starts the Divine Comedy by getting lost in a dark wood in the middle of the island. I’m not comparing myself to him, of course, but I think that it is psychologically true – every time you open your notebook or computer, and stare at the blank screen – you sort of retreat into yourself to think, “what will I put down here?” or “what does my hand want to type?” And then there is a little journey that you take through memory and associations, and so that getting lostness, that place where you are starting to think not with just your brain, but with a language – the thoughts of a language – is the place where writing happens.

I see immigrant writing as a place where you are starting to think with the thoughts of a language that both is and isn’t. And for me, that, conceptually, is not completely right, because at this point I am much more used to thinking in English than in Korean – it’s been 20 years since I’ve been to Korea; but at same time I’m quite aware every time that there is a sense in which people look at me, people look at my writing and say, “well, how is he able to use this language? What right does he have?” - this is a question I can imagine people asking, and that represents immigrant writing in my mind. And there are bits of language that I’ve lost - bits of Korean that I’ve lost, and I feel those severe gaps; I feel the thoughts I can no longer think.

Sometimes I try to find substitutes in English and that’s what I think immigrant writing is – analogous to immigrant cooking – trying to find the ingredients of your lost homeland, your departed homeland, your place of origin. There is a little bit of nostalgia, a little bit of looking back to recover something that you can’t quite reach, and that’s another façade of it.

OM: Also, you’ve mentioned before that immigrant writing is a conversation between languages.

SC: Yeah, sure.

OM: One of your poems, “A Translation for Nothing” actually embodies this concept.

SC: Yes.

OM: I think, Zhibek had some questions about it.

ZHIBEK SATENOVA: Yes, in “A Translation for Nothing” you wrote, “The language itself speaks them, the way it was not Teresa but God who spoke” – Can we say that all we are is our memories? Does your memory speak when you are speaking?

SC: Oh, it’s not quite a memory that speaks. In this case, if you mean the memory is something that is a factual recollection of something that happened – parts of the specific event in this poem definitely happened to me, but at the same time when I am recalling things, I’m always turning them into a story, right?

I think we all do that. And so, that changes things, you know, like – it’s one reason why we don’t really look at a poem as a source of biographical detail – we think of it as something that happens to the speaker of the poem, and that removes us from personal memory – this is something that also always happens when you write, and it also always needs to happen when you write.

Even when you are writing a memoir – you’re doing some sort of confabulation. In fact, when you represent yourself to yourself, you’re confabulating. So, in that sense, you yourself are fictional, but to answer the question of whether the memory speaks through me the way God spoke through Teresa, I would say that when I say that God spoke through Teresa, I’m saying that Teresa is sort of possessed, that Teresa is sort of not there.

And God speaks through her in the same way that I was just actually talking about language speaking through us in thoughts of language.

I’m not sure that the memory itself is a thing that speaks. The memory is sort of the thing that creates the gateway. It is what allows language to possess the speaker; it is sort of a crucial vulnerability.

OM: Is it like a train that carries stuff?

SC: Maybe. I was thinking more about the lens of the possession metaphor. There was it’s a thing in a horror movie that person does wrong and, therefore, makes himself or herself vulnerable to whatever.

OM: Earlier you said that when you write something and you use Korean, you ask yourself very harshly, “Do I have the right to use Korean?”, but I am thinking about poetic license – how does poetic license reframe the terms of immigrant writing, can we define immigrant writing as conversation between languages?

SC: That’s a good question. The language – I was talking about people possibly wondering whether I have the right to use – was, in the original context, actually, English, but I can see the other way around too, because as somebody who is no longer primarily, or purely, or whatever – Korean.

“What right do I have to use Korean?” is, probably, a valid question for many people to ask.

OM: Okay, you’ve mentioned homeland departure. I guess, in the context of immigrant writing, does the homeland ever depart us?

SC: I carry my homeland with me as a set of voices that chime in, saying, “do this, or don’t do that”, and I hear them, and I don’t necessarily do anything they say.

I think I'm a bad settler, a bad homeland maker, and I think that sort of willingness – in terms of working with what you have – is yet another way that defines my idea of immigrant writing.

You can recreate the homeland, and you can recreate it perfectly, and neither you should strive for, but instead, you add to it, you cut, you pour over it, you mix things that you’ve found.

OM: You’ve also said that you wanted to talk about a form in-between prose and verse, that my favorite Russian writer called “proetry” - prose & poetry. I don’t have a pointed question here, I just wanted to hear what you d to say.

SC: I see it as a continuation of what immigrant writing is, what an exile’s writing is…

OM: Why?

SC: Because, again, I see it as a way of finding ingredients that aren't necessarily in the original, the prescribed, the orthodox, but instead pertain to your life as you live it, as you wonder, as you look around…

I, on a very pragmatic level, am very impatient with the shorter poem. I have written them, but I’m always left feeling that I have – I want – to say more.

So, I see it as a process of subtraction, and there is a wonderful art of subtraction, a really wonderful art to lose the things that don’t matter completely, centrally, to whatever the rest of the poem is. But then I think, “what is central? What is necessary?” and that changes, and I always want to give the reader a sense, that everything matters in a given context for a given speaker – that is my primary impulse.

So, I get discursive, I try to include everything in a way that – in so far it is possible – in constraint, in some sort of linear nature of the sentence. And things start to cascade, and split apart, and they start to – the river metaphor is forming here – the things start to pool, and start to bend, something starts rushing off in other directions.

So, there is no way to do that in a single form, so I had to make myself a form in which I could do that – and that’s what I suppose the hybrid, the “proetry” is.

In terms of how it relates to immigrant writing, I guess, I think of it as a sort of extra wondering, and movement through the landscape is procreated by the movement, which is the geological features of the place, which were there before you went through it, but the way you see them, the way the mountains look from the side of a train, as you pass through them, the things that you think as a result of that.

The particular shape of branches moving in the wind at a particular moment, the shape of clouds, the angle of light – all these things are things particular to the person who moves, and how he moves through them, and that’s something like a mixed genre.

OM: So, in those terms, immigrant writing is foundationally a mixed genre, right?

SC: For me, yes.

OM: If you could talk to any God from any religion, which God would it be? And if you were allowed to only speak in poems, in poetry forms to this God, what would you say?

SC: This is a terrifying question. Many answers present themselves, but I suppose – in this context – Persephone, because I think that, in one sense, when you write, you’re always talking to Death.

OM: She’s sort of an immigrant herself.

SC: Sort of, yes. Although I’m a little uncomfortable saying that her original capture and rape were immigration, but yes, formally.

OM: I have one last question. What is your obsession right now?

SC: Well, when you write, and when you’re in your temporary transient relationship with language - who is in control?

I know that throughout this interview I have talked about this process as language entering me, saying things through me, but, I suppose that I’m not sure, that it is always the case, or I’m not sure that it’s always a useful model for me.

This is a thing I was wondering about. I was thinking about that old Norse myth about the wolf Fenrir, who is bound by the Gods, and when they bind him, they tie him with really strong chains of metal, which he just shakes off.

And the third time, they bind him with the rope made out of “impossible” things – things that did not exist for the people, who were telling the story – things like the roots of mountains, breath of fish, women’s beard, and a couple of other things – six things in total.

In one reading of this, they bind him with figures of speech, with oxymorons. So, in one sense, how they bind this wolf, that will eat the world, is with poetry, that is definitely a valid reading of it.

On the other hand, for the people who were telling this myth when it was alive, when it was a living religion, what happens is that they basically subtract these things from the world, they take them out of the world to bind him. So, in that sense, what the rope becomes is a thing that constrains what is possible, and the wolf becomes sort of everything that is possible, the set of everything that is possible to say in language, that is not nonsense.

I’m torn between being on the side of the rope and being on the side of the wolf.