Mia Sloan
Interview with Hua Xi
Across her work, the poet and writer Hua Xi reveals the strangeness of ordinary life. She asks: What does it mean to navigate a world that collides internal and external realities? How can we place vastness, expansivity, and timelessness in relation to our everyday existences? And how can poetry touch on these complexities in ways that are both “tremendous and pure”? A recent Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, Xi’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The New Republic. Her honors include the Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award from Poetry Ireland, the Poet-to-Come Award by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Winner of the Oxford Poetry Contest and the Boston Review Poetry Contest, Xi is currently working on her first manuscript of poems entitled The Room of the World.
WASHINGTON SQUARE REVIEW: What initially drew you to poetry? What is it about poetry that excites, inspires, moves, or challenges you?
HUA XI: I think poetry can engage with very complex ideas in a way that still feels deceptively simple. Today, I was rereading a set of poems by Tomas Tranströmer, including the poem “Open and Closed Spaces” (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2011/transtromer/poetry/). The poem opens with a line thatsuggests that people experience the world through their work as if through a glove. The glove then transforms and becomes its own sort of world. I found this poem so existentially and profoundly beautiful, both in its ideas and in its execution.
Reading this poem, I feel the distinct capacity of poetry. Poems like this take us to a place that only poetry can go. Not to say that poetry is a better or worse medium than other artistic forms, but that it operates on the world in its own unique way. And so much of poetry engages with existence in a really pure and tremendous way. It makes me feel like I am understanding existence with a new level of depth. The fact that we’re able to receive these few short lines with images of a glove being turned inside out and the house and season and life inside of it, and then extract meaning, makes me feel suddenly attuned to the capacity of language and our capacity for meaning. Sometimes I feel lucky that poetry is a medium that resonates with me, because there are ideas and feelings that can be transmitted through poetry that feel deeply singular and special.
WSR: In reading your poems, I’m often struck by how you unravel apparently ordinary things––particularly objects––into philosophical sites for unexpected encounters with abstraction, timelessness, and expansivity. In particular, I’m thinking about your poems “A Table,” which was in a recent New Yorker issue, “A Bookshelf,” which was published in Poem-a-Day, and “Toilet,” which appeared in The Paris Review. Could you tell us more about this dialectic between themes of concrete- and ordinariness––such as physical objects, often utilitarian––and themes of abstraction or vastness?
XI: Those recent poems are all about pieces of furniture because I just finished working on a manuscript where each poem revolves around an ordinary house-hold object. I’ve actually always been drawn to abstract concepts, and I’ve always been interested in this idea that poetry can answer some of the questions of philosophy. I think poets often respond to similar innate feelings of wanting to know the world and the self as philosophers do. Yet poetry offers a tool for answering those questions that is, in many ways, less rigid and perhaps more natural than the practice of philosophy. In poetry, it’s possible to resolve things emotionally rather than logically, so it can be satisfying to engage with broader philosophical questions within poetry.
You’re right in saying that writing about these physical objects was a way for me to contrast concreteness and abstractness. I think a wide range of surrealist artists and writers have always done that––made work around objects, moved objects around, replaced objects. It was a way to push against the typical mental model we’ve formed of the world and make new associations. For me, it’s also a way to challenge my own ideas around reality. A lot of my manuscript revolves around the idea of reality, and the ways it has been shaped by a history of mental illness in my family. What is reality when people remember it and experience it differently? What is a table if we remember it and experience it differently?, etc. That type of question.
And in the end, I’m interested in the idea that ordinary life is actually very strange. When we account for the traumas that people are psychologically holding at all times, the experiences and paradoxes and inequities that people are constantly internally managing and keeping inside, when we consider all that, I think most people actually experience life quite strangely. Then ordinary things can appear quite strange as well. And I think people are keeping quite vast things inside, those ideas of timelessness and expansivity you brought up, to continue to live an ordinary life. Those are some of the kinds of thinking that I was attuned to when working on this manuscript.
WSR: I found that many of your poems evoke the natural world in relation to the human imagination in some way, whether through subtly woven imagery or references to seasons. A few lines in “Hand-Drawn Face,” which was published in Poetry NW, come to mind: “I drew a glorious springtime in the margins / of a school exam / but then // the questions blew away.” Could you tell us more about this throughline across your work? What other themes or questions influence your poetry?
XI: I think I use a lot of nature imagery, but I consider it mostly to be metaphorical. I rarely sit in front of a natural landscape when I’m writing. I’m actually mostly indoors in front of my computer. These images of nature are a way to express my own thoughts and feelings, even when, day to day, I’m not surrounded by that much nature since I live in a city. In a way, I guess the natural world itself has become somewhat abstracted for me. It’s become a part of my internal lexicon, perhaps because it exists for me mostly in terms of ideas, images, memories, and other second-hand references. So I guess when I think of using the word “springtime” in a poem, I’m not really thinking of any specific springtime that I’ve experienced, but rather the collection of images and stories and movies that take place in springtime that I’ve consumed over the course of my life that eventually constitute my idea of springtime. I probably turn to this type of description because I’m more interested in describing a sort of internal experience or mental model of the world than describing my actual, physical surroundings.
WSR: You’re currently working on your first manuscript of poems titled The Room of the World. How would you describe your process for putting together the book? Have you learned anything new or surprising about yourself as a poet or artist?
XI: I think I took a while to put together this first book because I wasn’t that interested in doing just a collection of unrelated poems I had written. I wanted to work on something that was a bit more of a cohesive project.
I feel like I had to learn a lot about the difference between writing a manuscript and writing a single, individual poem. Something I’ve had to think about is the difference between a poem that is written to be published on its own, in a journal or magazine, and a poem that is meant to go in a collection among other poems. The type of poem that works well on its own in magazines is a poem that, to some degree, explains itself in that it doesn’t need any other context. You don’t need to have read the poet’s other work, and you don’t need the context of other poems to grasp its meaning. I was more used to writing poems like that. But I think having too many stand-alone poems in a manuscript actually doesn’t read as well. To some degree, I actually think it’s harder to develop complex ideas across multiple poems if each poem is set up to be a stand-alone poem as well. So I had to change the way I was used to writing. A lot of the poems I wrote later on for the manuscript probably won’t be published independently because they don’t necessarily make sense or wouldn’t feel complete enough on their own.
There’s a lot I don’t know how to do in poetry. As I put together the manuscript, I still felt pretty new to writing as a profession and that there was much I didn’t know. It’s interesting––all the places where I had difficulty with the manuscript or struggled with poems made me realize there is so much I can still work on with my writing. That made me feel hopeful that writing can be a lifelong profession for me, and that there is always more for me to learn.
WSR: What does your creative process look like on a day-to-day basis? How do you go about writing a poem?
XI: My day-to-day process is very scattered! To be honest, I write most of my poems on the Notes app on my phone. Sometimes I’ll be going about my day, or I’ll encounter a piece of art, and an idea will just connect for me. I jot that kind of stuff down on my phone. I don’t put poems into a more formal document of any sort until I feel like they’re pretty much done. Most of my poems are all jumbled together in a long and disorganized Notes document separated by em dashes.
When I was writing this manuscript, many of the initial poems felt as though they came naturally. Both the form and content felt like something that naturally extended from the ideas and aesthetics that interest me. But towards the end, as I was filling out the manuscript more, I wanted to be more focused about it. I made a list of random household furniture items, then went through the list one by one and tried to see if I had anything to say about them that could eventually become a poem. I tried to be very logical. Maybe a half of my manuscript was written that way. I wouldn’t say I was forcing it, but I was trying to be more intentional about sitting down and trying to write a poem about this subject or that subject that day. This is probably why some of those poems never ended up working at all, even if I spent much more time on them than the initial poems that came more spontaneously.
I had an unpublished poem about a piano that I wrote two or three times that way, sitting at my computer and intentionally trying to write it. I also read a lot about pianos. I thought about pianos I’d encountered in my life and tried to write my memories down narratively. I did a few drafts, and I liked those drafts enough to move on, though I still felt like they were missing something. And then randomly, one day months later, when I had forgotten about all of that work, I had a completely different idea for a poem about a piano and wrote a few lines very quickly in an afternoon. That version is the one I ended up using. It doesn’t draw from any of the research I did. So I feel that it’s very hard in the end to really direct myself to work on poetry in a way that is productive—I sense that it might be different for prose. Most of what I intentionally work on never ends up getting there, but maybe that work also clears the way for the more spontaneous ideas to come.
WSR: What are you reading right now?
XI: I am reading Tomas Tranströmer’s memoir, Memories Look at Me, which is why I was reading those Tranströmer poems I talked about earlier. He wrote relatively few poems in his life, but his poems have had an outsized effect on me. That’s been inspiring. So far, the memoir recounts events in his childhood in pretty short chapters. He actually doesn’t talk about his poetry much, but more about his family and growing up, which I also find inspiring.
Hua Xi is a poet based in NYC. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, among others.