5 Questions with Luoyang Chen
Born and raised in a small town in Fujian, China, Luoyang Chen currently lives on Wongatha Country. Luoyang is the author of Flow (Red River, 2023). They are interested in the lyric ‘I’, 自然, ‘stasis in darkness’, language, positionality, and ‘O’.
Their poems have appeared in journals and anthologies such as Westerly, foam:e, Overland, APA, Cordite, Rabbit, Hello Keanu!, Portside Review, The Suburban Review and more. They are very funny.
No.1
What did your read growing up? How do you think your literary trajectory has shaped your practice as a poet now?
I was born and raised in China. I only started reading literature in English in my late teens. The English books that were first introduced to me were by an IELTS teacher whom I still admire; her name is Hellen Huang and the books she recommended me were The Catcher in the Rye, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Flowers for Algernon. Then, in a Poetry Club facilitated by Chris Lynch at Trinity College in 2016, I was introduced to Sylvia Plath and some other poets.
I did not comprehend Plath’s poems back then—and I still don’t—but I knew I had to. I really wanted to study English Literature at university to understand why I feel charged when I read (good) poems, why poetry is such a force. Prior to all this, I was always in the top three in my high school Chinese class—I loved the selections of Chinese literature (particularly classical Chinese poetry, as well as contemporary essays) that I came across in my curriculum. There, I read 李白 (Li Bai), 陶渊明 (Tao Yuanming), 苏轼 (Su Shi), 李煜 (Li Yu), as well as 鲁迅 (Lu Xun), 施耐庵 (Shi Nai’an) and 巴金 (Ba Jin). Outside school, I found myself frequenting bookshops with my friend 书宜 (Shu Yi) and reading the Misty Poets (朦胧诗人) such as 北岛 (Bei Dao), 顾城 (Gu Cheng) and 舒婷 (Shu Ting). Thinking back, I remember I once got scolded and humiliated by my primary school Chinese teacher for writing a poem for a Chinese essay writing test. She called me a ‘trouble-maker’. To some extent, I think that was (and still remains) true. I’m somewhat proud of it now.
I’m in debt to all the books I’ve read, particularly to those that on a conscious level, engage with and influence my practice as a reader and writer. I think having that interest in literature (even though it was purely out of unreasonable, dreamy obsession) at a relatively young age was the beginning of my passion for writing. Having said that, I know that I am an expressive person and that I need a tool to not just express but also craft the troubling deep inside me. I need a tool to convey and conjure the poetic impulse. I thought about other artistic disciplines such as music, painting, drawing and acting, of course, but language seemed to me to be the most accessible tool (simply because I have no other creative talents and am pretty lazy). So far, language seems to work pretty well for me.
No.2
In Flow, you play with the different meanings of the word, as well as use it in multiple ways including referring to (some) poems’ speakers as such (e.g. ‘At the dinner gathering you asked Flow…’; ‘Flow looked at your eyes’), both earnestly and sarcastically. As a result it’s very dynamic and of course, conjures imagery for movement, for flow. The three act structure adds to this as well. How did you begin to conceptualise Flow as a full-length poetry collection?
Well, I have this simple idea that everything that is living moves: body, language, narratives, love … even the rock which implies time moves. When contemplating the idea of movement, I made a decision that Flow would be written from the positionality of a pseudo-immigrant poet-speaker, as an international/Chinese student in so-called ‘Australia’. Flow is thus a character based on my own lived experiences, but with a fictionalised touch. What’s less obvious, or flows beneath the surface of the poems, I guess, is that the flow—of voices, narratives, positions, power, and love—distinguishes the verb ‘to flow’ from the subject/noun ‘flow’. This is evident in, for example, ‘the flow of Flow’ in [the poem] ‘The Flow of Flow’ and ‘words flow’ in ‘Words’.
Flow the book begins with an ‘immigration’ poem. It attempts to capture and signify this idea of how ‘everything moves’, and the collection ends with a poem about ‘returning’ to the self, a deep unconscious sea. Flow is composed of three Acts with three epigraphs (from Gu Cheng, Bhanu Kapil and Joy Harjo, respectively) that loosely hint at what those sections are about. They are Flow’s guides, narratively speaking.
I must confess here though that the book almost failed in the sense that the fragments were not able to attract each other in a consistent manner. The only reason that it did not fail (at least to me) was because Andrew Sutherland, a good friend of mine who is also a poet, told me on a walk home during a very noisy, strange night that the narrative of Flow had gotten lost through the book. It was crucial timing: I already knew that what Andrew said was true before that night, but I did not yet have the courage to re-structure the last two Acts of Flow. I needed that final push, and they gave me exactly that. The act of re-writing began soon after that night. So, thank you, Andrew.
No.3
There’s a certain self-referentiality in Flow that is used to interrogate inheritances—be that cultural, linguistic, sociopolitical, migratory, etc. Beneath this is a fierce critique of ‘Australian multiculturalism’, and how the geopolitical situation between Australia and China results in those from the Chinese diaspora generally forced to ‘pick a side’ in conversations about race and ethnicity, and who are never truly considered within a Bla(c)k/White dichotomy. This is particularly felt in Act I, then slowly moves into something softer as the speaker pens letters to loved ones near and far. How do you think your positionality simultaneously influences the text, as well as reacts against it?
Although this is no longer true, [being able to conduct] political and social analyses were the predominant reasons that kickstarted my desire to write. I still consider writing political. Flow is certainly political. But I no longer wish to write with a political purpose; I want to just have fun with language and creativity, and write and edit whatever poetic impulses I have that may become Experiences themselves in the form of poetry, though one can argue that this playfulness itself is a kind of political act. And allow me to reiterate myself: what I do not want [to achieve through poetry] is that binary imperative I-know-better undertone. I really do not enjoy narcissists talking about mindfulness, self-awareness, positionality, authenticity, etc. I also dislike poetry bosses criticising other poetry bosses without reflecting that they are themselves poetry bosses. Here is a mirror. Come on, don’t we have our own tastes? Aren’t we all poetry bosses?
To answer your question, I re-direct the question to many more questions, i.e. (1) what is Asian?; and (2) what is Culture? The third confession I would like to make in this interview is that I don’t know [the answer]. What I do know is that nothing is binary, whether that’s culture, gender, war. [As a result] the critique of ‘Australian Multiculturalism’ is more a critique of [the collection’s speaker] Flow.
So, the question the book tries to tackle is: how to write a poem about ‘Australia’ from a ‘non-Australian’ point of view? Which raises another question: What makes ‘Australian’ ‘Australian’? Subsequently, how come Flow is not ‘Australian’ even though he is (though legally speaking he isn’t)? This emphasis on the bizarreness of the concept of generated (national/cultural/linguistic) identity can be equally applied to anti-racist discourse. Again, the question at stake is: how to be both ‘is’ and ‘is not ‘at the same time? Again, the answer could be—non-binary.
As you said, as the poems flow through each Act, the voices/narratives/positionality softens (though equally powerful and fierce, I hope). Personally, reading poems that more or less speak the same idea(s) bore me. To maintain my own interest in the process of writing Flow, I needed to write poems that are not the same so that I myself can read them without getting bored. Flow is the way. Flow must go and keep going. Flow must moan for the loss. Flow is still moaning as he goes. These poems, though finished, are still going. A returning to personal loved ones is a reminder to stay resilient while being kind: being kind to others, to oneself, and to the healing process of trauma that arises from the system that wants to take everyone down. Flow is simply my way of saying: love.
No.4
In the Acknowledgements section, you mention the poets and writers you’re in conversation with, of whom include Bhanu Kapil, M. NoubeSe Philip, Yukio Mishima, and many more. One of the people you thank is Lucy Van, who taught and inspired you when you were at the University of Melbourne. I thought I’d ask you a question I asked Lucy in her own 5 Questions interview for her collection The Open: How do you interact with what you read? And how do you then interpolate influences into your work?
My writing interacts with other writings in the forms of reading, reflecting, meandering, daydreaming, and writing. The writers and poets I acknowledge in the book write about and/or from many interesting (at least, interesting to me) ideas, positions, forms, voices, and sounds. Bhanu Kapil, in particular, gave me the courage to speak to power in a manner that acknowledges, respects, moans, and uses self-sacrifice. On a sidenote, what makes a book ‘a book’ is fascinatingly investigated in the mesmerising performance of her book Ban en Banlieue. Equally fascinating is her investigation of the power dynamics that haunts the non-linear relationship between the host and the guest.
I am a bit reluctant (embarrassed, really) to talk about Lucy Van because I don’t really know her and she doesn’t really know me either. But what I do know is that the poets and readings selected in that class she taught, ENGL20032 Poetry, Love, and Death, were phenomenal on many personal, poetic, and technical levels. And I think I understand what Van is doing in The Open, except that I do not have the language (at least in that ‘review’ sense) to describe it. I could maybe describe it through poetry. Perhaps this is too bold and self-indulgent of me to say, but my poetry is, in a way, a review of what I read.
I quite like the word you use—‘interpolate’. I think this rings true to my writing practice. I guess how I interpolate my influences into my works depends on the types of reflections the influences evoke as well as on the sounds and visions that I consider interesting and poetic. Authorship (and ownership) does not terrify me. What terrifies me is the hidden narrative that drives certain motives of competing, performing, glorifying, loving and killing.
To plagiarise myself (from the poem ‘Museum of Ghosts’):
Competitors and lovers,
What is this you want?
No.5
Is there anything in your writing process that has stayed constant through the years? Or do you have routines that you return to when everything else allows for variation? What particularly buoys you in the process of writing poetry?
I cannot sit on a desk and write for a half an hour or an hour every day. Wherever there are reflections and contemplations happening, there are poems and writings being constructed in my mind and in my notes. I write whenever I am present.
Further, some of the poems I wrote later on helped explain what I could not comprehend both before and at the time of writing them. In this sense, writing is my process of comprehending what’s going on around and within me. I write as I go.
There are poems that I find more and more interesting (despite having pretty much no capacity to utter my full understanding verbally) every time I return to them. These poems are to me infinite. This infinity buoys and fascinates me in the process of reading and writing poetry. As a result I’m not scared of periods where I don’t or cannot write because I know I can write when the time and space is right.
(Credit: Sophie Minnisale)
Find out more
Flow is a debut collection of poems by Luoyang Chen published in collaboration with Centre for Stories and Red River Press in Delhi. Flow was developed and published as a result of Centre for Stories and Red River Press’ Green Leaves, Red River writing program.
“Flow is a brilliant, cohesive work of vision and revision. Flow might be disembodied, but the Flow of Chen’s vision is provisionally bodied, a metapoetic spectre who flicks and refracts: mirror, memory and capacious mind. Flow is a truth-teller and a teller of lies with some truth to them. Flow navigates trip-wires and sunlight. Flow moves from currents of dark history, crossing and translating places and generations, holding a light to the violence of racism and exclusion, choosing instead radical openness and connection.” –Felicity Plunkett
Get it from Centre For Stories here.