Adrienne Chung
“What Do You Write About?”
There are certain markers of dinner party conversation which signal its rapid demise: disparaging the wrong food truck to the wrong person; questioning the etymological legitimacy of the word “compersion”; having to answer the ostensibly innocuous question what do you write about? Two of these may be site-specific to my current homebase of Portland, Oregon, but the third is enduring and ubiquitous, a reminder that wherever you go, there you are, living the same life in this same body.
In the beginning, I answered this question honestly: I’d say, I write confessional poems about mommy issues, daddy issues, relationship failures, loneliness, shame, guilt, sex. It’s admittedly somewhat of a bit—and therefore predicated on truth—but nonetheless a reply given in good faith. I quickly learned, however, that the type of person who asks this question has no interest in a list of my neuroses despite having asked for them. It’s not the answer they were looking for, even if they didn’t know what that was. They don’t find it funny, or even crass. Instead, they find it inappropriate, perhaps the worst offense of all, akin to asking How are you? in a Germanophone country, where a straightforward question elicits a straightforward answer: less of a fine, thanks and more of a I am not well. My dog is dying of an incurable cancer…
The discord is clear—there’s a level of psychic distance that’s expected from and must be maintained during surface level interactions. Breaching that distance is out of order, inappropriately humanizing and disruptive to capitalist function. It’s against the rules, unspoken as they are—not that I let that stop me, in any case. I still deliver this litany when I’m feeling antagonistic, or simply bored.
As a reactionary measure, I then began answering this question in the dullest way I knew, by reciting the spiel on the back of my book: something about Darwin and Jung and lineage and received forms. I thought it scantly academic and sufficiently impersonal, and thus the ideal non-answer, but what this loses in provocation, it gains in an opacity that reads as pretentiousness—what does any of that have to do with rhyme? No one likes this answer, including me, and we soon disperse one by one to the bar, staggering our departures from the table.
In the introduction to Pathetic Literature, Eileen Myles opens with the declaration that “In general poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really Literature is pathetic. Ask anyone who doesn’t care about literature. They would agree. If they bothered at all.” I thought if anyone would have a good answer to this question, she would. So when her book tour passed through Berlin that spring, I went. So eager was I to hear her answer that I was the first to ask a question after the reading, the sacrificial lamb of the evening.
She looked at me blankly, the way people do when they’re not even interested in sizing you up, then said something to the effect of, “I don’t know? I’d probably tell them that I write about anything and everything that’s ever passed before my eyes.” As she said this, she waved her hand theatrically back and forth across her face to simulate the moving tape of a film reel, then abruptly directed her attention to the next audience member with a better question and a trendier haircut.
When I was in my twenties and freshly arrived in New York City, I briefly dated an artist who had himself just arrived from Alabama. He was in graduate school and made music on his computer and had ideas about things that seemed beyond the scope of my intellect.
“Paintings are so archaic,” he once said.
“Totally.” I walked over to where he stood before a painting which was lain on the floor. We were touring the open studios of his MFA program.
“I mean, what are you going to do with one, hang it on the wall?”
He said this with an exasperation so fluent that, for many years, I remained wary of paintings, because they could only go on walls.
Another time he told me that the only art which interested him anymore was cave painting.
“Like, horses fingerpainted on the wall?” I asked.
“Exactly,” he said.
We were dining on momos near his apartment in Midwood. I wanted to ask why cave painting was okay, but painting paintings were not.
“Just think about those guys who have never been to a museum, or seen art before. What possessed them to walk up to the wall of their cave one day and just say, fuck it?” As he said this, he drew a picture of a horse in the air with his pointer finger, then gazed at the space above and between our heads, chewing.
What possesses us to draw a picture? To write a poem? Elaine Scarry says that beauty “seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication,” that “when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.” She traces the latter idea to Wittgenstein, who said that language operates by creating “pictures” of reality, where sentences represent facts in the world. Under these premises, a poem might be about something beautiful, the author so moved by its material form—perhaps a sunset, a glistening lake, the stunning drop off the coastal cliffs of Marin County.
While neither philosopher suggests that beauty is a requisite for putting pen to paper, I want to clarify that beauty is not what impels me to write. I don’t want to recreate the beautiful things I saw and felt, not because they’re uninteresting, but because I don’t think my experiences and capacity approximate any sort of singularity. I have loved intensely and stupidly, but not particularly deeply, and if I did, it was so long ago that I can no longer remember how it felt. I also don’t want to recreate pain, as I’m not a masochist—at least not to my knowledge. Replication in this sense is not what I’m after. The Tang dynasty poet Li Bai famously praised the poems of his friend Du Fu by saying that reading them was “like being alive twice.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but I’d rather die than live twice, even if it meant driving once more up Highway 1, looking over my shoulder at a view that I never want to forget.
In “What We Talk About When We Talk About the Confessional and What We Should Be Talking About,” Rachel Zucker says that confessional poetry “contains a quality of potential self-immolation that is best understood by imagining [the] moment when Oedipus asks Jocasta for the truth about his parentage.” By insisting that “the truth must be made known,” Oedipus precipitates his own demise in the face of his mother’s pleas to retreat, to turn away from the truth for his own good. “My own good snaps my patience, then; I want none of it,” he says to her. Here, there is a drive to express the self in addition to destructing it: Oedipus makes manifest not only his impulse to self-immolate, but situates it within the context of his identity and its temperamental desires. He rejects that which is an affront to his patience, his character. By self-destructing, he delineates the contours of and foregrounds his selfhood.
What’s destructive about the truth, however, is not only truth-as-self-knowledge, but truth-as-broadcast, as Oedipus wants for the truth to be “made known.” He wants the culprit to atone for his sins and then suffer the grief and humiliation of exile from the walls of Thebes. Using Zucker’s analogy, we could say that this is not unlike the confessional poem in that it isn’t enough for the poet to feel, dissect, and metaphorize their shame; they also need to set the evidence in verse and then convince someone to publish it. We open ourselves up, willingly, to the punishment of being seen, then judged. Confession, after all, requires another person at the other end.
What I write about, then—if I may try my hand again at the titular question—is that path toward self-immolation, from the seed of the initial impulse to that split-second before the mind impels the body to act. By connecting the various events and things and people—entities related not by causation but by meaning—into one poem, I’m attempting to map meaning onto the external materia of my life, nonsensical as they are.
This isn’t to say, however, that writing a poem has ever helped me make sense of whatever it is that I’m writing about. (Imagine if you could simply write a poem about love, and fourteen lines later emerge with heart and mind clarified…!) Unlike narrative, the engine of poetry is not causation, but association. Verse essentializes, but it also complicates and constellates, and in complicating something, we confer onto it meaning. Some readers may find it helpful to conjure the infamous still of Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia S04E10, in which he’s caught up in a conspiracy theory and builds a mind map on the wall with newspaper clippings and photos, each connected to one another by a haphazard maze of red string. Those unfamiliar with the show might recall the one made by the character of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001). Beyond a sign of mental disarray, these maps are proof of life: they lived, they saw, they connected this to that.
My poems trace the staggered path of feeling as it moves from beginning to end, the beginning being the thing which animated a desire, and the end being the moment before self-immolation. I want to find that seed which planted the feeling that impelled the mind to move the hand to paper, to wall, to fire. What is that and where does it come from? How did we get from this to that? That’s what I write about.