AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Cathy Park Hong and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Shit Moms and More

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected].)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cathy Park Hong:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Spring and All”)

bash it—
bash it in.

and the stones weep water,
and the stars sink
          underwater.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Cindy Juyong Ok, and we have the exciting pleasure today of hearing some new poetry by writer and professor Cathy Park Hong. Cathy is the author of the book of essays Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning from One World, and three poetry collections, Translating Mo’um from Hanging Loose Press, as well as Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire, both from W.W. Norton. Each poetry collection invents languages and bridges between them. There are personas, vernaculars, all these ways of resisting standardization and nationalization. And that critique is always performed with a sort of unique aplomb, and very studied fragments. Today, we spend time with a new sequence called “Spring and All,” available in the September 2023 issue of Poetry. Cathy, welcome back to the podcast.

Cathy Park Hong: Thank you for having me.

Cindy Juyong Ok: So your new poetry in the magazine is from this series titled “Spring and All,” which is also the title of a William Carlos Williams book, which was, I think, first published almost exactly 100 years ago. So he’s a poet you’ve been familiar with for a long time. Were you engaging with his work differently for this new work, or is the title sort of incidental?

Cathy Park Hong: You know, I’ve always read William Carlos Williams, and I’ve always taught him as well. And actually, these poems I call my pandemic poems and I, I was definitely hesitant to write pandemic poems. I think that’s sort of a subject matter that was exhausted even before it began. And even though we’re still technically in it, people feel, you know, hesitant or reluctant to read about it. But at the time, I was in between projects. And I was stuck in my apartment in Brooklyn, and this was early spring 2020.

Cindy Juyong Ok: 2020.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah. So, you know, I was reading a lot of Williams and I was just thinking about dailiness, the daily poem, which, you know, Williams sort of popularized as an aesthetic, just writing these kind of, the dailiness of life. And I was thinking about how time changed radically because of the pandemic, because we were stuck. Most of us were stuck in one space, except for the frontline workers. And I was wondering, I was thinking, well, how does that change our concept of time? So it was a way, when I was writing these poems, “Spring and Al,” it was a way for me to kind of arrest time. So the title was definitely inspired by Williams and his interest, but I don’t know if there’s a real kind of direct faithful emulation of his poetry. I was also thinking of seasons and so forth, and what that means, and it was also an experiment, because I don’t normally write this way. I don’t normally write “daily poems,” I’m usually very project oriented.

Cindy Juyong Ok: So what is it like now to revise or read this work from 2020? Does it bring you back to that mindset? Do you find yourself editing in a different way? Now that you’re, you know, teaching in person, and.

Cathy Park Hong: Oh, that’s an interesting question. I thought I would write, I wrote these poems. And then after I wrote them, I was like, I thought, okay, I’m closing this file and never opening them up again. But then, I had a reading in Brooklyn, and I didn’t have any poems to read. (LAUGHS) So I was like, well, I opened up the file, I was like, well, I’ll read these poems and see how it goes. So in that way, they kind of resurfaced and kind of became public again. And I mean, for a while I was considering maybe making it book-length. But then I realized that perhaps it can actually connect to a wider interest that I have that’s related to this book of prose I’m working on as well as these other poems. Because these pandemic poems, or “Spring and All,” I should stop calling them pandemic poems, (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cathy Park Hong: it’s an easily—it’s so coinable, to say something is pandemic, blank. I was thinking that, you know, there’s also a lot of strains of motherhood in the poems as well. And I think, in the back of my mind while I was working on these poems, what doesn’t really get discussed as much—I mean, we, of course, there was headlines about the casualties, the people who died, but even now, I don’t think there’s been really any kind, of any real public mourning or public grief for the pandemic for many people, except for those who actually lost loved ones. This kind of collective death is an abstraction more than anything else, because we have this, we don’t really want to look back or we don’t want—we just want to move on. And I never really understood that idea. Because like, my parents or my, and my grandparents, for instance, you know, they went through war and all of that, and then when they came to the States, they just didn’t want to kind of look back, they just wanted to move forward. And, and I now I kind of understood, I think I understand that sensibility more, it’s just like, well, it’s just, you just don’t want to be reminded. It’s unpleasant, you know.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Also it’s so unimaginable, right? I remember when it was we had 100,000 dead in the US. And I remember crying and crying,

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: and everyone talking about, we couldn’t believe it. And then it just went to a million, and it just felt like,

Cathy Park Hong: And then after that it was just inconceivable.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, absolutely inconceivable. And then there was also an estimated number for China alone that leaked, I think, what—do you remember what that number was, it was something, it was like 3 million?

Cindy Juyong Ok: And it was probably a really low estimate.

Cathy Park Hong: And that was probably a low estimate. But I was just thinking about the global number of deaths, and it’s just abso—you just, the mind cannot conceive of it, cannot capture it. And, but that’s always how it is when there’s just this mass death, people aren’t able to really, it becomes an abstraction, it’s too much, it’s too much. So, also, I think what hasn’t really been written about is just domestic life, or family life, or what happens within a family when family members don’t get along, or just being trapped with parents or being trapped with a wife or being trapped with a husband where suddenly, you know, there’s no escape, and you have to be with them day in and day out. How that kind of trauma hasn’t been really publicized or processed or really written about, you know. So in the poem, it begins with that mother from Wuhan, who’s a victim of domestic violence and her having literally escaping, her escaping her home and her being, like, welded shut into her apartment. And I think it was just a lot of strain for people to be who they, you know, to function as parental figures or as children or, or as children of parents or grandparents, and, and so forth. And I think I was very much aware of my role as a mother during the pandemic and sort of my own kind of struggles and failures as a mother during the pandemic. So, and that’s like sort of, that’s the kind of subject that I always return to. And I’m not really going to write about it, but it’s also like, in the poem, I also allude very, in a very veiled way, to the Atlanta massacres. And again, that’s not a subject that I’m, I’m not actually going to dramatize in my poems, but that’s what I was thinking of. And I was thinking about those sex workers as mothers. You know, many of them were mothers, and how many of them kept their profession hidden from their children. And I was, you know, thinking of that as well.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyong Ok: Would you read for us “Spring and All” from this new issue of Poetry, some of your more recent work?

Cathy Park Hong: Sure.

(READS POEM)

From “Spring and All”

     mak is the touch
of the potter, the thumbprint
on clay
the unfinished warp of wood
and braille
of grain

and knob
of rope that hangs
the squid that is dried
     for days
then eaten

with wine
fermented from
     dredges
of rice—

the Joseon potter
adjoins two hemispheres to make
a white
lopsided moon

exalt in these
imperfections

                 the act
of creation felt in
the thing

—not the smooth
not the screen—

                 and this grief
       that has no release—
grows inward
rooting into
      my spine, and
      from my head sprouts a flower
of gossamer blood
                threads,

bash it—
bash it in.

and the stones weep water,
and the stars sink
          underwater.

_____

a puddle
     of tadpoles tickle
her cupped
sunlit palms

twenty squirming commas
each with a beating heart

—amphibians are living
sponges
for pollutants—

she releases them
into the pond.

I tell my glum students
      who are trapped
on Zoom
I’ll set up a Google doc

where we’ll share
favorite poems
that remind
                   us of touch

and poems appear
like a scattering of ants
then
        trail off

      why bother

            jerking off’s
            numbing
            vibrator needs
            charging
can’t tickle yourself
when you can
predict your own
move-
ments

a poem can’t replace
                     his breath
my ear

spanking that ass

volunteers at the NICU
massaging preemies
      —tender newts—
so they’ll
thrive

O cuts and thorns
that leave a glove
of hives,

my mother never learned
how to hold
      a baby
though she spoon-fed me
till I was five

—she was a devoted mother
the obit says
when they don’t know
a thing about
her—

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyong Ok: Thank you so much. You mentioned “Spring and All” is maybe a different, is a departure from your other work. And I think some have described your poetry collections as having a sort of project, you know, I think of it is comparable to kind of like a concept album. There are, of course, always structures tying a book together. But sometimes that is more direct or identifiable to people, whether it’s the premise of the multilingual choices in Translating Mo’um, or the interview format in DDR, or Engine Empire obviously has these sequences. So you have these speculative poetics, and there’s something recognizable about that. So how do you see that shifting for you, or continuing for you now?

Cathy Park Hong: You know, after I complete a book, I always make life harder for myself by trying to tackle what I haven’t done before, or writing what I’ve always—tackling a subject matter that I previously refused to do, or that I’ve been afraid to complete. And with this group of poems, a challenge was to not have a project, and to just, you know, look out the window and write a poem and see what would happen. And also, in the past, I’ve often written in the persona. I was thinking, Well, what if I don’t have to have a persona? How will the “I” act on the page? How it would it perform?

Cindy Juyong Ok: Less of a mask.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, less of a mask. It was an experiment to see where it would go. But as this manuscript is growing, I do think that there is a concept. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS)

Cathy Park Hong: I can’t escape the concept. There is a concept that is tying these poems together. And I wouldn’t call it, like, speculative poetry, for instance, which is a genre that’s been pinned to me with Dance Dance Revolution and Engine Empire. It’s more just a through line, I guess you could say. I was just the other day I was looking through Tala Madani, do you know her, Tala Madani? She’s a contemporary painter, and she completed the sequence of paintings called “Shit Mom.” And they’re almost like these kind of cartoonish figures in a domestic setting and the mother is literally a pile of shit. You know, she’s just, like, oozing in fecal matter. But it’s cartoonish, so it doesn’t look overly grotesque. It actually kind of is reminiscent of Kara Walker’s work, or I was thinking, William Kentridge’s work or something and that sort of use of a satiric, cartoonish figures and so forth. And as, as I was looking at her paintings, I had, like, a light bulb went on, and I was thinking, Oh, this is what connects my prose book to poetry is that it’s, the book, there’s

Cindy Juyong Ok: A shit mom.

Cathy Park Hong: There’s a shit mom. It’s like, you know, this exploration of bad mothers or shit moms. And I’m not I’m not saying “Spring at All” really does that. But I think that there is—motherhood as a subject is considered very feminine, overdone, hackneyed, trite, and yet at the same time, to take on the subjectivity of a bad mother is still very taboo. You know, that figure is still lambasted by society. And I was, have been attracted to that, to the bad mother in various personas, various iterations, and so forth.

Cindy Juyong Ok: We’ve talked about avoiding the subject of your mother in public writing and the Asian American narratives needing to return to the mother. And the excerpt you read sort of almost ends on the mother.

Cathy Park Hong: Mm-hmm.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right, there’s like the feeding and the touch and then it ends on the obit. But then that devotion is sort of questioned or, or maybe it’s unknown. Because you’ve written critically about something like that, like that kind of pressure or pattern about Asian moms, does that liberate you in some way to write about these shit moms and be thinking about these figures knowing that you’ve made clear your awareness or your resistance, your understanding of, like, these kinds of predictions or these tropes?

Cathy Park Hong: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s hard, one can never escape the mother figure, it seems like. And of course, it’s a trope, it’s definitely like an Asian American trope. I think with these poems, however, I was more dealing with the subject of motherhood from my standpoint as a mother. But of course, there’s also the legacy and inheritance of how you are parented. There’s this term, clinical psychological clinical term called emotional dysregulation, which is symptomatic of all kinds of disorders from PTSD to borderline to, which is also a discounted disorder, where the reaction to whatever incited the reaction is always considered an overreaction or outsized, you know. So, it’s like, for instance, someone shouting at someone for being late. I mean, maybe this is just universal, it’s not just immigrants and so forth. But I’m just interested in finding more vocab—a richer vocabulary for that. I think it’s exacerbated by the fact that, you know, there’s often a language barrier or cultural barrier, and so forth, so. And also a historical barrier as well, because there’s this kind of expected amnesia that’s supposed to occur when you immigrate to the US, and not much is known about previous lives before they’ve come to this country. We don’t know the context. You know, a lot of times, I think, with the children of immigrant parents, we’re looking at them on green screen, right? We’re seeing them sort of flail or shout or react in such a way that seems disproportionate or outer proportionate to whatever the situation is at hand. But we don’t also see the actual backdrop, we just see the green screen. There’s a lot of terms that get thrown around, and I think also gets criticized for being overused, like PTSD, or intergenerational trauma, or even just trauma. You know, people sort of, there a lot of people who also criticize that kind of literature, because they’re like, Well, this is all a certain kind of marginalized group can write about is trauma. And I was like, I do agree with it, but I think it’s more about how you write it. And also, I don’t think we have a variety of terms or words to describe what these certain women go through when they come to this country.

Cindy Juyong Ok: You published an essay in Lit Hub about the summer of 2020 that was this sort of letter to your child. And it was literally addressed to her, I think. And I’m curious what it’s like to write from the perspective of motherhood, as the child gets older. If you find the need to have new language or just shift the expectation as you write in this kind of shit mom-embracing project.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, I mean, yeah, the trope of the shit mom is more kind of also directed at how the world’s attitude of mothers in general, and the kind of expectations are put on mothers and how—and Jacqueline Rose talks about this a lot—and how anything that’s, like, toxic, right, any kind of like toxic societal inequities are like, sort of blamed on the mother, you know. An old example would be, for instance, during the Clinton era, you know, where Black mothers were blamed, right, or during the Reagan era, welfare queens and so forth. But, but and it’s also kind of more directed at me being a mother and sort of the expectations that I have. Yeah, no, it definitely has changed. I think I’m, you know, now that she’s older, and she’s, she can possibly read and write what I am working on, I am less inclined to approach a subject in a more transparent way, I think. It’s like, I think I’m returning to kind of fictionalized mothers, and I’m returning to persona and so forth.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Mm-hmm.

Cathy Park Hong: And I don’t know that that necessarily has anything to do with my daughter growing up, but that has always been also my kind of, my process as well where, you know, I take personal parts of my, autobiographical moments in my life, but then I also weld it to other lives, fictional, historical, because I’m never interested in the kind of autobiographical individual life but more about the relational, how it relates to other lives in large. I’m much more interested in the collective.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah. And the multiple realities.

Cathy Park Hong: And the multiple realities, yeah. Which is why I always eventually return to the persona, yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Do you know that Korean kids’ story about the fight that the body’s having?

Cathy Park Hong: Mm-mn.

Cindy Juyong Ok: The whole joke of it, or I don’t know, I guess it’s more like a fable, but everyone says, “I’m the most important,” “I’m the most important,” the hands, the feet, and they all give different reasons. And then the asshole says, “I am the most important.” And they’re like, “Oh, you’re just an asshole.” But then the asshole stops doing its function, and everybody is affected. And so, you know, the moral is sort of like every part of the body is important or something like that. But like, shit also not being a bad thing, shit being like a positive, you know, product of things working.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, definitely. You should let it (LAUGHS) you should let it out, you know, it’s not, it’s not this abject matter that, you know, I mean, we’re usually so repulsed by it, right, because it is, reminds us of, it’s something that should be, that we think should be inside the body. Excrement should be inside the body or out of sight, but it’s, (LAUGHS) it’s important to excrete it out as, as well. But, you know, I was also in writing this poem, these poems, I’ve been really, I’ve been turning to a lot of Koreans, feminists poets, as well, like Kim Hyesoon. And I also translated a collection of poems by Choi Seungja. And so I was really inspired by her poetry as well. For her actually, it’s fascinating, Kim Hyesoon writes a lot about being a mother in a way that’s just so raw and excoriating that I don’t really see in a lot of American—read in a lot of American poetry. With Choi Seungja, it’s, she was single all her life and she was childless. And it’s actually, a lot of her poems are explored that subjectivity of being alone and being a single woman in a society where once you become a mother, or you become a wife of someone, you’re, your name becomes, your name is erased, and you become someone’s mother or someone’s wife, you know. And they’re really wrenching poems that explore solitude.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, those are, I think, two really good examples of different ways to approach the kind of disgust that’s put on, yeah, the women in different ways.

Cathy Park Hong: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, definitely. And I’m interested in exploring in both my prose and my poetry how their younger generation, the younger generation of women, more and more women in developed countries of a certain class are refusing to become mothers. And I’m curious about that kind of collective refusal that’s happening in Korea, definitely. And it’s happening in East Asian countries, in Japan. I think Korea, it’s the worst, where this younger generation of women are no longer, you know, having children where there is this crisis where if they don’t populate, or if they don’t reproduce, then that would mean an economic crash. And I was thinking about also just, you know, during times of war or during times of real extreme privation, you stop getting your period, you stop being able to have children because your body knows that it’s a hostile landscape for children. And I’m not saying that’s what’s happening to the bodies of these women, but I am thinking about just the unlivable conditions that capitalism has imposed on Korea that it’s no longer become, the city has no longer become livable, that women have just refused to reproduce. And of course, it’s also related to the patriarchy, right, that has just come to a head and now there’s this like all alt-right gender war that’s happening in Seoul, in the way these women after generations of just, you know, which can Kim Hyesoon just really wrenchingly writes about, of patriarchy in terms of the years of dictatorship, and also the effects of American intervention and so forth, where we have come to the point where women are just boycotting being mothers, boycotting becoming wives and so forth. And I see Seoul, I see South Korea as like kind of a harbinger of the effects, of consequences of what late capitalism will do to a country, like, because South Korea is such a tiny country and so wired. It happens to South Korea a little bit earlier than it does to say, the US, or other developing nation.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, anything technological.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, anything technological and so forth.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah. This is also a bit of a leap, but did you ever hear about Sammy Lee, who was also a Los Angeles Korean?

Cathy Park Hong: No.

Cindy Juyong Ok: He was like an Olympic diver. He was like the first, I think, Asian

Cathy Park Hong: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: He was in Los Angeles and practicing, and he would not be allowed in the pool in, I think it was Pasadena, because they only allowed, you know, non-white people on International Day. And so he would practice by diving into sand, like dry sand in his coach’s backyard, because the pools in LA were, you know, discriminatory. And I’d always heard this story because, you know, there’s a school named after him in LA, but that this kind of triumph, this neoliberal, like, model minority thing of, you know, him working hard and making it happen anyway. And then only years and years later, I found out that not only was that International Day only for men, but there was no day—there was a white woman day, and then there was the International Day, where the Black and Latino and Asian men were allowed. And then there were no women.

Cathy Park Hong: Mm-hmm.

Cindy Juyong Ok: And that wasn’t a part of the narrative that he was talking about in his life, or the Los Angeles School District was talking about as this alum. And that seems so connected to what you’re talking about, where, we have these conversations about technology or Empire or economy, and kind of forget this whole sector of reality, or have it kind of conveniently flattened in this way.

Cathy Park Hong: Mm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, that is definitely connected, and that’s really interesting. I didn’t even, I didn’t know that either about Sammy Lee, like, I didn’t know,

Cindy Juyong Ok: Oh, maybe you’ll do your pool essay. And then you could talk about it.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, the Red Hook essay. That was an essay that I wrote and abandoned. And that’s another essay that I will not look, go back to. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS)

Cathy Park Hong: Or look back on. Yeah, but if I did know about it, I would have written about it, definitely.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyong Ok: So many outlets, and so many individuals have been approaching you about Asianness. So what was that like to have it happen on such an extreme level after Minor Feelings came out? And what did it feel like to be treated as an expert on the subject when it was also a very personal book and, you know, not an ethnic studies scholarship, or, you know, what you’re primarily teaching.

Cathy Park Hong: It was a lot of pressure. You know, at the time, we were all stuck inside.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: It was all over Zoom or email, and, but there was a lot of confusion and rage and panic during that time. And, and a lot of uncertainty. And I thought, because I had a bigger platform, I had a responsibility to lend my voice to these narratives about Asianness or anti-Asianness that were really getting it wrong. And I think I initially felt that impulse when there were these anti-Asian incidents happening. And there were a few reports about it. And the reports were just so, like, it wasn’t getting at um,

Cindy Juyong Ok: The heart of it?

Cathy Park Hong: At the heart of it, yeah, the heart of it. And so, I felt like I had to write—so I wrote an article,

Cindy Juyong Ok: In the New York Times.

Cathy Park Hong: In the New York Times about it, because I just felt like there was a hole or missing, there was a hole in the media narrative. But then that just sort of escalated, where I was definitely positioned, and of course, in the sort of spokesperson role. And then, of course, that kind of, what comes with that is not just expectation, but resentment. And this accusations of how

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: I am, I’m not representative of this group of people or whatever. But of course, I’ve never intended to be neither, and never intended Minor Feelings to be that either.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: Minor Feelings, actually I was thinking, Oh, there’ll be, this will be a book for other poets of color, you know. And so it was, so definitely, it definitely, like, escalated. And it was a kind of pressure that I felt very uncomfortable to be in, because that’s not—my role is to be a poet, not a therapist or organizer, and people were coming to me for questions that I just really didn’t have.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: But I still felt compelled to say something. And I don’t, I really thought that everyone should, everyone, anyone who had any kind of presence online or offline, should be lending their voice. And that’s how I thought of it, as just being a part, rather than being the speaker and so forth. But you know, this is how the news cycle works, you know, and now we’re in 2023, and all of that has died down. People are not interested in the anti-Asian narrative, though it’s still happening. And, you know, I’ve also heard of people, even a few people saying that the quote-unquote “racial reckoning” is over, among progressive circles, which I always find both curious and predictable, right? There are always these upheavals, and then they’re these dips where people like to pretend that it’s all over until the next sort of crisis that amplifies it again. But I’m really quite happy to be back, just quietly writing, (LAUGHS) you know.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, the quiet poet. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cathy Park Hong: Being the quiet poet, just, you know, and teaching. You know, I’m in California now. And it’s, it’s much quieter here. And I like it.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Do you feel any of the differences of the, you know, longstanding East Coast, West Coast Asian ideas, now that you’re back in California and have left Jersey?

Cathy Park Hong: Oh, is there like a war between East Coast Asians and West Coast Asians?

Cindy Juyong Ok: I felt like I heard, you know, this idea. Maybe it was just in my generation, but there was this idea about we used Zynga and they used MySpace, or,

Cathy Park Hong: Oh, are you a West Coast Asian?

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yes. Yes, I’m from California.

Cathy Park Hong: Oh. I mean, I have to say that most Asians come from the West Coast and then they either, they move to the East Coast, and they just become East Coasters, East Coast folks.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t, like, really met enough Asians in the—I know, I definitely know LA Asians.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah.

Cathy Park Hong: And I think LA Asians are the best.

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS)

Cathy Park Hong: I know those are fighting words, but I don’t really, I haven’t really met very many Bay Area Asians yet. So, it’s a different cohort. You know, there’s, it’s a different cohort. I will say, you know, if we’re gonna do West Coast versus East Coast, I do miss the East Coast. I miss, like, you know, New Yorkers are just, they’re like, you know, they’re more, they’re blunt. They’re bold. They’re, they speak their mind, you know? And I miss that. Californians are nicer, you know, but it’s also not as fun. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, I think that’s so true. There is something weird about New York where everybody’s very professional at being in public so that like, you know, if someone’s, like, taking a stroller down the subway step, someone always just picks it up, it’s not a big deal, you don’t need to say “thank you” a million times.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: You know, I do like that pulse of New York.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, New Yorkers will be rude, but they help you out.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yes.

Cathy Park Hong: You know, whereas, in California, they’ll be nice to you; whether they help you out? I don’t know. That remains to be seen.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah. Well, it’s so exciting that you’re there. I mean, how long have you been at Berkeley in the English department?

Cathy Park Hong: I just started. This is, I guess, my second week into the semester, my first semester at UC Berkeley, and I moved to Berkeley exactly two months ago.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Exciting! Is your family sort of adjusting well, as well? Is there a lot of newness?

Cathy Park Hong: Ah, yes. (LAUGHS) I think it’s, it’s, you know, moving to a new city, a new coast, is really huge. It’s like an endless to-do list of what you have to do. Everything that I took for granted in New York, like going to the pediatrician or going to see my dentist, you know, that all becomes challenging. I’m, like, finding a new pediatrician, finding a dentist.

Cindy Juyong Ok: It’s like starting over.

Cathy Park Hong: Just starting over, which is more, more of an adventure, it’s something that’s expected, right, when you’re 18, in your 20s or in your 30s. But when you’re in your 40s, and you have a family, it’s just, I don’t know. I don’t recommend it!

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, maybe it just takes longer.

Cathy Park Hong: It’s a tough adjustment. Yeah. It takes longer. People say—depends who you talk to you, but people say the adjustment period can last from anywhere between two years and five years, so.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Whoa.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, no, that’s pretty long, right?

Cindy Juyong Ok: I guess we’ll see. I mean, I’m more optimistic.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: So maybe a year, maybe a year and a half. Who knows?

Cathy Park Hong: I mean, another friend of mine said one year, but she’s a pretty optimistic person, so.

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Yeah.

Cathy Park Hong: I’d say it’s probably going to be two years.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, it is true, the optimists are not the best at predictions.

Cathy Park Hong: No, no.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah.

Cathy Park Hong: I’m more of a defensive pessimist myself, so.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, then you can prepare.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: So we have a question into the void, which is a question saved for you by someone who didn’t know it would be answered by you. But this one’s coming from someone whose work I know you love, Douglas Kearney.

Cathy Park Hong: Oh, I hope I can answer his question.

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Douglas Kearney: All right out there, mystery poet. Well, you’re not a mystery to yourself, you’re just a mystery to me. Or maybe you are a mystery to yourself, and that is why you write poems. But here is a question to the void that I would like to put out there. What is something that nobody ever asks you about, about your poetry or your poetics that you just wish somebody would ask you?

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cathy Park Hong: That’s a great question. I have to think about that one, though. I don’t know if I can answer that right away.

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cathy Park Hong: Oh, my God, hmmm. I don’t know. It’s like, actually, it’s sort of, it’s a question that’s more—all I can think of is, What music do you like to listen to while you’re writing poetry?

Cindy Juyong Ok: That’s a great question!

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, because

Cindy Juyong Ok: What music do you listen to?

Cathy Park Hong: Right now? I have to look at my phone. (Cardi B PLAYING) I’ve been missing New York, so I’ve been listening to a lot of Cardi B. Not while I’m writing, but it’s more just like outside. You know, when I’m, just around this period when I’m working on a book. I guess that would be the question, like, what’s your soundtrack? What’s your soundtrack for the book that you’re working on? I think it’s like, you know, fun questions like that. You know, usually the questions are very serious.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Totally.

Cathy Park Hong: They’re intellectual, or it’s the kind of question that’s about the writerly process. And perhaps that’s the kind of question that I would like to be asked is, What’s the soundtrack of the book that you’re working on?

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, I think I didn’t ask you enough about rap.

Cathy Park Hong: Oh, yeah. I think it’s also because there’s not enough, you know, when you’re in New York, you just like, you’re, I’m not, I’m not a hip hop aficionado, by any means. But it’s just always on the street, you’re just out on the street, and you hear music, or just music being blasted from the car, and so forth. And in Berkeley, there’s, what I notice is the absence of hip hop, which, you know, I think, is evidence of the demographic of people here and so forth. And there are less younger people in Berkeley. So I think I’m like, I miss that. So I’ve been just sort of personally listening to more hip hop and more Beyoncé, and so forth. Whereas interestingly, when I was in New York, I was listening to, like, classical Spanish guitar, (LAUGHS) because I needed, I wanted more, like, calmness in my apartment, so.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Can you listen to music with lyrics while you write?

Cathy Park Hong: No, as I was saying, I can’t listen to it while writing. It’s always after I write or before I write.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: Yeah, so maybe I should say it’s the music that you listen to during the period, around the period that you’re working on the book, yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Nice, so you do like to write in, like,

Cathy Park Hong: I need total silence, but usually, in the East Coast, it was a lot of jackhammering and construction and so forth. So I would have the white noise machine on, you know?

Cindy Juyong Ok: Right.

Cathy Park Hong: And now I have that silence, so that’s one benefit of being in Berkeley.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Well, thanks so much for doing my job for me and coming up with such a great last question. Maybe another question that’s like that might be, do you have any, as someone, you know, who’s writing about pottery in this poem, and who’s been in the visual art world and knows so much about music, do you have any side projects, whether of viewing and enjoying or making, alongside the work that you have right now? You know, like, anything that kind of connects to it or supports it? Even if it’s just like little drawings for yourself?

Cathy Park Hong: Hmm, that’s a good question. I wish. I’ve just been breaking down boxes. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyong Ok: That’s an art, though. It is an art to get them the right size.

Cathy Park Hong: I’m terrible at it, right, but I don’t, I haven’t, I haven’t really had time to, you know, craft things or make things. But then I’m also a person—my friend accused me of this—of someone who’s incapable of having hobbies. So, you know, and I think that’s always been a big, just something that’s been deficient, you know, in my life, it’s like, I wish I could be the kind of person who can have a hobby, like knitting or drawing pictures and so forth. But I, you know, I have been, you know, when I can I like to draw a little still lifes with my daughter and so forth.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Oh, sweet.

Cathy Park Hong: But yeah, and I wish I could take up pottery, because I am interested in pottery. And some day when I have—this is, I’m an aspirational potter. Like when I have the time, I would like to make little vases and so forth, yeah.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Yeah, pottery would be a great one. I’m sure there’s stuff there. I bet you could even learn how to blow glass.

Cathy Park Hong: No, that’s,

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyong Ok: (LAUGHS)

Cathy Park Hong: that’s too sophisticated. That’s just way too much. I don’t think I have the lung capacity for that.

Cindy Juyong Ok: Well, the pottery will keep your hands busy and hopefully fill up your house with lots of tchotchkes.

Cathy Park Hong: Yes, I need more tchotchkes.

Cindy Juyong Ok: It was great to hear “Spring and All” and all else. Thank you so much for joining, and really appreciate your taking the time.

Cathy Park Hong: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your questions.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyong Ok: A quiet poet thanks to Cathy Park Hong and her many soundtracks. Cathy is a poet, writer, and professor who has published three volumes of poetry and the collection of essays, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. You can read work from “Spring and All” in September 2023 issue of Poetry, in print and online. If you’re not yet a subscriber to the magazine, there’s a special rate for podcast listeners. For a limited time, you can get a full year of the magazine for $20. That’s 10 book-length issues for $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. Music In the episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster dePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Until next time, for autumn and all, thanks for listening.