5 Questions with Eileen Chong
Eileen Chong is an Australian poet of Chinese descent. She was born and raised in Singapore, and came to Australia as an adult migrant. She started writing poetry in 2010, and is the author of eight books published in Australia and the United States.
Her work has been shortlisted for numerous prizes, such as the Anne Elder Award, the Australian Arts in Asia Award, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and twice for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Her first book, Burning Rice, is the first single-author collection of poetry by an Asian-Australian to be studied as part of the NSW HSC English syllabus. She lives and works on unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation.
No.1
A Thousand Crimson Blooms is your ninth book, and what seems like your most vulnerable work yet. Can you tell us a little bit about the process behind putting it together? And do you think your process—in terms of writing—has changed over time?
I have been writing poetry for 12 years now, and the process remains a mystery to me. I am grateful every time I write a poem. Each poem requires its own mastery. I never think about a collection when I am in the process of writing. I simply focus on getting the poem I am working on down on paper, and try to push its language to its most taut, its most distilled.
When I feel like I have exhausted my poetic well after a period of time, usually a few years, and when I have around 200 poems or so, I then look at the poems as a whole. Then I pull together the strongest poems, or the poems that seem to belong together, and try to collate them into a manuscript of about 50 poems.
I think I have a little more confidence around not writing now. I used to worry a lot if I went for weeks or months without writing a poem. I am a little better at trusting the process, and myself, and believing that not writing—the process of rest, reading, refilling the well, and wool-gathering—is also a part of the writing process.
No.2
There is a deep sense of grief in this collection. In the poem ‘Making Sense’, you write, ‘I tell my students: / poetry is a way to make sense / of what you fear.’ How do you move through the feelings and create poetry with it?
For me, one of the roles of a poet is to look closely at what the world in general tries to not look at, to not see—this could mean uncomfortable truths, or injustice, or pain. In psychology they speak of avoidance, and how what you avoid is often at the core of what needs to addressed. Similarly, I try to practise this close looking around what I don’t want to write about, what we, as people, tend to keep hidden.
This is deep emotional work for me, an excavation of the psyche. It can be a lot to handle. I find reading poetry, and experiencing art and music centres me, and strips away the layers we necessarily adopt in order to get through life and the world, and allows me to enter into the feeling through words, to reach towards the core of pain, or grief, or any other states of deep feeling, including joy.
No.3
How do you use spacing, punctuation, capitalisation, etc within poetry to get to an idea?
One of the elements that distinguishes poetry from prose is the presence of lines, line breaks, and stanzas, as opposed to the sentences, paragraphs, and chapters of prose. I feel like the form of poetry simultaneously pressures language into precision, while also giving it expansiveness and ambiguity.
Negative space matters a lot for me in poetry—what is left out, left unuttered, can be as important, if not more important, than what is allowed presence, utterance, and being.
It is also important to me that poems exist as sounds in time—each poem should be read aloud, to be experienced as moving breath in a body and in the air and the ear. Poems are songs that need to be sung, and to be heard. Poets use various tools to achieve musicality in a poem, and it is a shame that most people only read poetry silently on the page.
No.4
In A Thousand Crimson Blooms, some of your poems are in conversation with another writer’s work; other times they are directly addressed to someone in your life. But there are also times where you simply refer to ‘we’ and ‘you’. I’m curious about this: do you think about an audience while writing and how does this perception affect your work?
The audience for each poem shifts, I think, even within a poem. I don’t consciously think of an audience when I write. Often I feel like I am simply speaking to ghosts—across time, across pages, across my own knowledges.
Perhaps a poem is a way of speaking aloud in dreams. Each poem I feel is part of a larger conversation in humanity—and not just in poetry, but in all fields of human knowledge. It is part of the fabric of the world. A person is a poem, as much as a poem is part of a person’s being.
No.5
Who inspires you right now?
I am in love with the world, with humanity, with everything it has to offer. I find the world endlessly fascinating—and everything is inspiring. I do often look towards writing by women poets, in particular women poets of colour, often writing in languages other than English.
I find these works to be very powerful, and a source of comfort, support and solidarity. They help me to think in different ways from how I was taught in the (white, male, British) literary canon, and to write more truthfully, more freely in myself.
(Photo credit: Charlene Winfred)
A Thousand Crimson Blooms is Eileen Chong’s new poetry collection. Her luminous poetry examines the histories—personal, familial and cultural—that form our identities and obsessions.
The collection is a deepening of her commitment to a poetics of sensuous simplicity and complex emotions, even as she confronts the challenges of infertility or fraught mother–daughter relations. Entwined throughout are questions of migration and belonging. Viewed as a whole, this collection is a field of flowers, aflame with light.
Now out with UQP, or find it in all good bookstores.