The Pulse of a Poem: Why Poetry?

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I hated the way my Japanese clumsily dribbled from my mouth. “How has your mother been?” my grandmother asked through the phone. In Japanese that effortlessly lifted through her, my grandmother had asked me a question to which I responded, in my clumsy Japanese, with a “She’s alright.” That was all. The only Japanese that ever left my mouth consisted of one-syllable words. I wanted to honor and keep the neglected Japanese part of me alive in places outside of me, and while I could not speak Japanese fluently, I was fluent in what I lacked. I began to utilize this fluency in poems, gradually filling myself with a sense of fulfillment over reviving the part of me that both terrified and completed me by detailing my grandmother’s wartime stories or the internment of my Japanese ancestors. In this way, I am passionate about utilizing poetry to reconcile with and be kinder to our quieter constituents, such as how I strove to with my Japanese heritage.

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In this way, I write poetry to wholeheartedly immerse myself into my passion to engineer a space of “and” —a space where I can authentically exist as a sum of all the parts that constitute me. I write with the promise of being able to boldly and freely live in all my colors — my passions, identities, and quirks—and more valuably, to attain the courage to seek out more. I seek to discover every hue of every day, from its smallest elements to its grandest events, by employing what I would like to call a “kaleidoscope thinking”—continuously searching for vibrancy in an ever-evolving and shifting world—through my poetry. I’m boundlessly optimistic about writing’s innate capacity to defy and redefine, and through my “kaleidoscope thinking,” I aim to navigate how every shard of striking glass aligns to create sense from the mosaic of moments constituting or relevant to my life. Whether it’s about how I pen my grandparents’ skewed love in how “my grandfather coos through the phone, the way an orphaned letter aches for the womb of a word” in my poem “Mother Tongue” to my great-grandmother’s dementia as “every memory sleepwalks across her skin, an ice cream truck dinging in the middle of a desert” in my poem “Ode to my Great-Grandmother’s Dementia,” I utilize poetry as a metaphor for imagining what could be in a world that always is. In a sense, I utilize poetry to perceive the world as a metaphor for the goodness it could be. I’m boundlessly optimistic about poetry’s innate capacity to defy and redefine—for poetry’s capacity to continuously revise itself alongside our own revising as human beings.

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My favorite poet Ocean Vuong notes poignantly that the “practice of metaphor is…the practice of compassion.” And I believe that, by extension, that is what poetry is—a practice of compassion. As Vuong observes once again, poetry is where “you have to look deeply and find lasting relationships between things in a disparate world.” Especially in a world that has become ever-divisive due to the pandemic, I believe poetry is necessary in how it requires patience and thoughtfulness—in how it requires you to believe in the potential for yourself, people, and the world to be more than what is. Just like poetry, we also exist only in the plural—in all our possibilities.

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As much as poetry has been and continues to be a personalized process for me, I ultimately want to grant others, especially those who find themselves marginalized and underrepresented, the spirit to determine their own “and”— to find empowerment in their self-expression and their own selves, guiding them towards understanding that the narratives they share with the world is necessary and lasting. I am passionate about further establishing poetry as a lineage that we all have the capacity to collectively share and participate in to inherit our most colorful and whole selves. I am consistently aiming to channel my writing into allowing others and myself to reimagine and relearn the world, as well as ourselves, not as what it is, but as what it could be by looking through the indefinable kaleidoscope that is poetry.

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A quick after note: poetry could be daunting because it seems so elusive—it is tricky to detect the pulse of a poem. That is why I have attached a handy list of sweetheart poems of mine that always compel me to detect their pulses and keep my fingers there forever.

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· “Hide and Seek with Time Machine” by Anna Journey

· “Good Bones” by Maggie Smith

· “Into the Breach” by Ocean Vuong

· “Poem for my mother’s cleaver” by K-Ming Chang

· “Choi Jeong Min” by Franny Choi

· “A Name” by Ada Limón

· “Poem Always Having To Repeat Itself” by Darnell “Deesoul” Carson