AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Kimiko Hahn and Cindy Juyoung Ok on Mentoring Your Younger Poet-Self and More

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

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Kimiko Hahn:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Not Nothing Again”)

I think of nothing but wind
or the black universe
though we see the sky bestrewn
with stars and planets.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Cindy Juyoung Ok, and Kimiko Hahn is here today to consider family, form, gender in relation to her poetics over so many decades of writing, something like 35 years of publishing poems, but really more like 60 years of writing them, because she wrote her first poem in grade school. Kimiko’s poems and their wildness, their certainty have come to prove the formal political and aesthetic range of Asian American poetics. Her first books came out with Hanging Loose Press. She has chapbooks from many small presses, including Sarabande. And the most recent full-lengths are with W.W. Norton, including Foreign Bodies in 2020. And excitingly, she has a forthcoming new and selected volume with them called The Ghost Forest. She has recently won the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Poetry Foundation. In The Unbearable Heart, her collection with Kaya press from 1996, Kimiko wrote that “real bliss, if acknowledged, is not in the routine/that bludgeons passion but yes, in disturbance.” Routines and their violences are not a part of this poet’s wide, constantly reinvented practice. There are generative disturbances of every kind shape and style across her poems and in our conversation today. And much bliss. Kimiko, welcome to the podcast.

Kimiko Hahn: Thank you so much for inviting me to chat with you and share my poems. I very much appreciate it.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, big congrats on the recent award!

Kimiko Hahn: Thank you. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: How did you feel about having your life be deemed this time that has achieved lifetime achievement?

Kimiko Hahn: Well, first I started crying. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Aw.

Kimiko Hahn: And in later days, I thought about the phrase “lifetime achievement.” And I feel that the Poetry Foundation is validating what I’ve done in the past, but also looking ahead at what I’m going to do in the future. And that is reassuring. It’s challenging.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) Definitely.

Kimiko Hahn: And I feel really honored for the look back and the look forward.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That’s a beautiful way to look at it, I think. It’s about the lifetime that is ongoing. And I think measuring a lifetime always kind of requires looking at the origins. And your mom and dad were both visual artists. And so you grew up with story and painting and poetics and you even have a collection titled The Artist’s Daughter. How do you now remember all those ways you learn to understand art as possible for yourself or necessary for the world? Has your understanding changed?

Kimiko Hahn: Well, art growing up was a very playful endeavor. It was also—and this was from an early age—about craft, although no one talked about that. But you know, my father would be walking down the street or we’d be driving in the car and he’d say, “Look, that’s a mansard roof.” (LAUGHS) So my sister and I would, you know, little girls like, “Oh, that’s a mansard roof.”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: “Why is it a mansard roof?”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And what is a mansard roof?

Kimiko Hahn: It is a roof that slopes down and has very visible, I guess, they’re shingles or tiles. Now, I’m embarrassed. I can’t describe it. (LAUGHS) I know what one looks like.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Well, you can see it. Yeah, you can see it.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, yeah. Also, I realized in later years that my mother, who was also a visual artist, but did not practice art the way my father did, that she was the more intuitive one. And he was the one that was more thoughtful and deliberate about his practice. And I feel that I’ve been fortunate to inherit both from them. Really able to rely on intuition and trying to see where, for example, the poem is going, before I decide where the poem is going. Being less deliberate in certain parts of the process of writing and revising.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Exactly. The poet cannot necessarily determine the consciousness of the poem while it’s being written.

Kimiko Hahn: I hope not. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) We just reflect on it. We just identify it later, like the mansard roof. And now you are a writer married to a writer. So does that feel like it’s sort of in the family, something that makes sense to you about having art in the home or a certain attention to the world?

Kimiko Hahn: It does. My husband Harold Schechter is not only a writer, he is now a professor emeritus of American literature. So, I have really benefited from his academic background, which is American literature, but also Jungian psychology, and a look at mythology and fairy tales. And then also his very wide ranging, and oftentimes disturbing writing on psychopathic sex murder. (LAUGHS) So, it’s an ongoing and wonderful relationship. And we like to kid with each other, although we’re both very serious, that we are each other’s research assistant.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Everyone needs one. And I think historical true crime, maybe it’s not so different from a poetry practice. I mean, you both kind of seem to need to research for your books, take from the news, take from history. And maybe that’s all part of the same kind of core.

Kimiko Hahn: It is. And I really benefit from his disturbing library. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) So you read some of them? You read some of the books in them?

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, absolutely.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Have you ever collaborated or sort of worked on each other’s work, as you’re coming up with these ideas or working through a project?

Kimiko Hahn: We show each other our work as we move along at different stages and comment. And we have collaborated on anthologies published by Everyman Pocket Poetry.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Beautiful. Well, speaking of volumes that bring together poems from all different kinds of times and people, you have a volume of new and selected poems coming out, which to my knowledge is the first one of yours. How did the title come about? Can you tell us a little bit about how you titled it, and how this volume is coming together?

Kimiko Hahn: That would be a pleasure. Thank you for asking. The title is The Ghost Forest. I was reading the New York Times, which is a daily habit, and I saw this beautiful essay that had amazing photographs along with it. A ghost forest is actually a real phenomenon. When the ocean levels rise, the saltwater moves into the land, and eventually can seep into freshwater marshes. When the salt attacks the roots of the plants in those marshes, the vegetation and the trees begin to rot and die, leaving behind a ghostly presence, or remains.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The marks of the forest.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, exactly. So I actually have two poems based on that information. One is a sestina, or at least started out as a sestina. (LAUGHS) And now is a ghost of a sestina. And the other is actually an erasure using that article. As I began looking at the new and selected, a friend actually remarked that the title didn’t really cover the whole manuscript. So I began thinking about that, and working out in my mind and in the manuscript different ways that the ghost forest came up, and comes up metaphorically. So for example, I have a lot of poems, new poems, but also poems in the past that hark back to, allude to past writers. So there are ghostly presences, if you will, throughout. And sometimes I will start with a form, and then that form actually is only a first draft. So, as I begin to work on it, it is no longer, for example, a sestina, but still retains some of that sestina. So it’s what people call the ghost of a sestina.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Have there been ghosts that have come to you as you’re putting together this lifetime of work and writing and arranging works from, I’m assuming, 10 books?

Kimiko Hahn: Yes.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: What kind of ghosts are coming out to you, whether it’s themes or kind of your old poems, what is it like to read those and remember who wrote them?

Kimiko Hahn: I decided that I wanted the collection to start with new poems, and then go back in time. So, a reverse chronology. I am going back to that young woman in her 20s.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, end on the beginning.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, end on the beginning. Absolutely. So I hadn’t thought of it actually, as that young woman being a ghost, because she’s still alive.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: But I do feel that the woman who I am now, who has been a professor, who has been a writer for these many decades, is going back and being a mentor to that young woman.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Kimiko Hahn: I did not do an MFA. I had a lot of amazing workshops as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, where I studied with Louise Glück and Charles Wright, among others. But I didn’t benefit from the more intense kind of MFA program. Which is fine. But now (LAUGHS) that I’ve been teaching at an MFA,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: You’ve been teaching in one.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, yes. At Queens College, which is part of the City University of New York, by the way.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Shout out.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, absolutely. That I, I wanted to mentor that young woman. So I have decided to lightly revise those poems, not to revise the woman, but to assist her in sharpening and deepening what she wrote all those years ago.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: When you think about the poems that can take on different, you know, multiple renderings, like the Marianne Moore poem, “Poetry,” which she published a million times, all different forms, some of them were 20 words, some of them were three pages, and the even Bishop’s “One Art,” the most famous, probably, villanelle, you know, had multiple kind of versions and drafts, and it didn’t necessarily mean that the final one was the only one, right, like the early ones still tell us something. So I think that kind of revision sounds really interesting and, and hopefully exciting for you now to be engaging, you know, talking back to your old self.

Kimiko Hahn: Engaging, and it feels good to mentor that young self. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm.

Kimiko Hahn: Also, there’s a great deal of melancholy, going back and revisiting periods of my life where I was going through some challenging, shall we say, and tumultuous, I will admit, moments in my life. So there was a great deal of sadness, too, but that’s okay. Y

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kimiko Hahn: I’m feeling something. So that’s good.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And it’s kind of also the forest, right. Like, there’s a lot there. And there is a lot that was there, and the terrain has shifted.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Kimiko Hahn: I was an undergraduate, as I said, at the University of Iowa from 1973 to ’77. It was an amazing time. We undergraduates watched the graduate students who were at the time, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Michael Burkard, Tess Gallagher, David St. John, Sarah Gorham, and many others. So we were watching people who would become really heavy (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow, Iowa City was happening.

Kimiko Hahn: It was, it was pretty wild. And you know, we were just undergraduates watching, (LAUGHING) watching all the competition going on. Little did we know. So that was fun. It was interesting. It was lively. It was extraordinary. Then, when I left Iowa City, went back to New York, and I was living in the city with my then boyfriend, he was very political. He was involved in issues of social justice, civil rights, and I became more and more involved in that myself. So I did leafleting at 6AM outside factory gates, (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes.

Kimiko Hahn: and I, on the one hand, had friends who had come out of writing workshop environments. But on the other hand, I was making friends with very political poets, Sekou Sundiata was one of them. Also, Jessica Hagedorn, who was running the Basement Workshop at the time, Fay Chiang, Frances Chung. So I was really involved in very different kinds of poetry communities. And that was so much fun.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Are there elements of that New York that you entered into at such a young age, the Basement Workshop, all these kinds of collectives outside of academia, outside of institution, are there elements of that you recognize now in the New York you live in today?

Kimiko Hahn: I think Cave Canem has done a wonderful job. Increasingly, they’re not an MFA program, but of course, a lot of their fellows, from what I understand, or their instructors come out of MFA world. Which is fine. I mean, that’s a natural progression. But I think they still maintain a kind of gritty, funky (LAUGHS) element, which is super important. I think Kundiman still has that as well. My students, especially my undergraduates, at Queens College, are pretty unusual, I think. First of all, many of them come from immigrant families, first, or second generation. Some of those speak more than one language aside from English, and come from very working class situations. And because it’s a commuter college, they’re mostly living at home. 99% live at home. So, they are challenged in different ways to move ahead and to make their own communities and to kind of bust out into adulthood. So, there are elements of what I went through around me in the city university system.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: How did you end up at Iowa for undergrad in the first place?

Kimiko Hahn: My parents were friends with Ralph and Fanny Ellison, and also with John Ciardi. And when they knew that I wanted to go to a college where there was poetry and poetry writing involved, they suggested that I write to Ralph (LAUGHS) and John. So I did. And John Ciardi wrote such a sweet letter back and gave me a couple of places that he recommended. One was Iowa, and I think the other was University of Michigan.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Somewhere in the Midwest.

Kimiko Hahn: In the Midwest. And Fanny, Mrs. Ellison, wrote back and sent me a pamphlet that listed the writing programs in the different colleges. And I noticed that Iowa had listed like a dozen teachers, because they were using their graduate students to teach undergraduates as well as having a number of faculty to teach their graduate students and visiting writers as well. So I thought, Wow, they have a lot of people there, I’m gonna go to Iowa. And I got in (CROSSTALK) high school student.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it all worked out though.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, so I got in and it was a good place for me.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Even in the folio in the magazine, you have the villanelle, pantoum, golden shovel, contrapuntal, the of course, very, you know, attached to you, I think a lot of people think of you and the zuihitsu as going together. Would you read a great example of one of these from this new folio? Maybe “Villanelle with a Line Borrowed from Bishop” since we’re talking about her?

Kimiko Hahn:

(READS POEM)

“Villanelle with a Line Borrowed from Bishop”

The child looks out the window at the peeling barn.
The mother sits on the roof and waves at her.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove.

The child has put away her Little Marvel Stove
because her grandmother is baking real bread.
The child looks out the window at the peeling barn.

The two inside are preparing dinner for three.
(If the mother comes down from the roof.)
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

a song about some mother on some roof
(likely the mother that is her daughter).
The child looks out the window at the peeling barn.

The child hums along while she stands
to survey her reeling barn and to hear as
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove.

She’s drawn at least half a dozen barns today.
She stops humming and sings her own song.
She looks at her mother atop the peeling barn while
the grandmother sings to marvel the stove.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That last line, I mean, what a turn!

Kimiko Hahn: (LAUGHS) Thank you. It took me a while to figure that one out.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s beautiful. And I think it’s just so interesting because the line that’s borrowed from Bishop, as the title states, “the grandmother sings to the marvelous stove,” is from a sestina. So a sestina is haunting the villanelle as well, the core of the of the villanelle. Were you reading Bishop and others from her generation when you were studying early on, since you’ve always kind of had this relationship with forms and other poets?

Kimiko Hahn: I was not. I, when I started writing, I was a hippie of the kind that did not write in form, too bourgeois. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, gotta resist.

Kimiko Hahn: Gotta resist. It’s only been in the past, mm, 15 years maybe, that I’ve really become quite committed to writing in forms. And in the past 10 years, certainly, the new poems have largely been given forms, to the point where I, especially during the pandemic, looked up forms to challenge myself. That sounds pretty highfalutin, doesn’t it? To challenge myself. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: I did it as writing prompts. Yes, I looked up those forms as writing prompts. Elizabeth Bishop, I didn’t encounter until maybe my 30s. And honestly, I didn’t really care for her poems. I was not drawn to her tone. And I felt that some of her writing was a little flat. But I was wrong. (LAUGHS) It is deeply rich. And the tone, for example, in “First Death in Nova Scotia,” is absolutely perfect. That’s a poem I wish I had written. (LAUGHS) I aspire to write a poem beautiful.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I also want to mention that this poem, this villanelle that you wrote, starts the first three lines with the child, the mother, the grandmother, so they’re sort of stacked up against each other visually, and, of course, hearing it. And then the child and the grandmother take on the two repeating lines. So the first and the third line, which repeat for the rest of the stanzas. And you’ve written about your grandmother, also your daughter’s and their grief when your mother died. Does having the experience of being a grandmother now affect the way you think about your own grandmothers or, you know, literally or figuratively, grandmothers, that relationship across generations?

Kimiko Hahn: I haven’t thought about that very deeply. Mostly because I don’t have time, because my grandchildren have me running ragged. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Yeah.

Kimiko Hahn: But I do think about three generations. And how my precious grandkiddos (LAUGHS) are so lively. And it is such a delight, especially to watch them learn language and narrative, and even talking back, as it was when my daughters were learning language. That was miraculous, in a way.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That’s great. I wonder if even your interest in the in the Heian period and what Japanese women were writing is sort of like looking towards that generational contact? I mean, very, very great, great, great, great, great grandmothers of literature, but,

Kimiko Hahn: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: to kind of have these lineages, how histories connect, how language is passed on. Can you talk a bit about what they were writing and how you engage with them?

Kimiko Hahn: Oh, absolutely. The women in the Heian period in Japan, which is roughly 800 to not quite 1200, I think. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Around there.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, around there, around that period. They were writing in Japanese. And we’re talking about an extremely, extremely small percentage of the population. This was the aristocracy.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kimiko Hahn: The men of the aristocracy were writing in Chinese. This is what they were taught. It would be like Westerners being taught Latin.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm.

Kimiko Hahn: But the texts that had come over were sometimes 100 or more years old. So they were using and reusing language and imagery and narratives that were borrowed. Nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time. (LAUGHS) But that had become kind of stale. The women were writing in the language that was part of their lives and part of their bodies. And so the writing that they produced was vivid. It was alive. So much so that they changed Japanese literature. This became a huge turning point. Being a woman and writing influenced the writing during that period. So, the French feminists are a favorite of mine. Not that I’m totally steeped in French feminism, but I love the idea of writing the body that they introduced. And I really believe that the Japanese women at that time were writing the body.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm. Yeah, because they’re also focused on language being spoken or exchanged on a day-to-day basis. I think that’s really interesting. And I always think about who in society thinks of language as prescriptive, right? “These are the rules. These are the old texts we must follow. This is intellectualism.” Versus who thinks of it as descriptive, changing it, noticing it, gathering it. And that can be also a national thing. Like U.S. dictionaries are more descriptive and French dictionaries are usually more prescriptive. But your life in poetry and reading so much history, is there sort of a gendered phenomenon for you about how you focus on language or what you think through in order to find the words that you then shift or the forms that you push back on?

Kimiko Hahn: Yes. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: Sometimes when I’m reading other people’s work, just like at an old bookstore, for example, I sometimes just open the book to any page, and I, I don’t even read the work, I just kind of look at the language on the page. And I can tell what texture the language is. I happen to personally like language that is a medium to dense texture. That’s what I’m drawn to. Now, I have forgotten your question.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: About whether gender plays a role?

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, I think gender does play a role. So going back to Elizabeth Bishop, I could not understand what writing the body meant when I first studied those texts. And I was looking, I was searching, I was on a quest for finding poems that would serve as models, as experiences. And when I read and reread many times Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Waiting Room,” I realized this is it. From the language to the images, the fear that the little girl experiences, what she sees, sitting in the waiting room, and just seeing people’s knees, because that’s eye level for her, peeking at a 1918 National Geographic and seeing half-naked women from Africa. Well, they don’t feel half-naked. They’re dressed as they, they’re going around, as they usually do. But this was the equivalent, I’ve been told, of soft porn for that time. People would like to look at National Geographics (LAUGHS) to get a little titillation. In any case, for a child, it was, especially in New England, Nova Scotia, New England, this was shocking. And then she realized that her body would one day become a woman’s body. This gave her a feeling of vertigo, which I totally, totally understand. I think that when my mother first told me about menstruation, I think I was (LAUGHS), I went through something like that, that absolutely physical, frightening realization and moment. So I love that this poem pulls me into that experience. It’s such a gorgeous poem. Another one of her poems I wish I had written. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think you’ve also written about the, you know, after a mother’s death, thinking about the nudity of the mother, have I seen my mother naked, in an early book, I believe. And I wonder if that’s connected, this idea of like, what will I become, and how does it all connect?

Kimiko Hahn: It does. And actually, I had never put that together with the Elizabeth Bishop poem. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s like the inverse or something.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah. Yeah. But absolutely, there was a moment in my childhood, and so, as my students are wont to say, it really happened. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: I stumbled into or, or opened the bathroom door, and my mother was taking a bath, I believe to cool off on a hot summer day, and I saw her naked. And it was shocking to see her breasts. This was, you know, in the late ’50s. Yeah, that made such an impression on me.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I think one great point you’ve made about form is—and maybe this relates to any kind of form, not just poetic received forms—but the idea that any kind of spontaneous use of form is only successful because of the consciousness of composition, the practice that it takes. And this, you know, sort of respect for what goes into the art in terms of skill, in terms of practice. And you’ve talked about the sampling and corresponding with poems. Have you ever sampled a poem of a living poet unconsciously? Like not really realizing what is influencing you? Or do you always kind of have a track of how it’s happening, and what’s coming together?

Kimiko Hahn: Well, if I have quoted living poets, I don’t know, and no one’s told me! (LAUGHS) So if anyone’s listening, and they know, you know where to find me. I don’t know if I have quoted living poets without referencing. Possibly, now that I’m thinking about it a little more, possibly, Adrienne Rich, who’s Twenty-One Love Poems I adore. And I’ve been trying to write my own version for literally decades.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: But you’ve used that as sort of an epigraph or something, so that seems like you have quoted it. (LAUGHS LIGHTLY

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, I have. Yes, I’ve bowed to that poem, and also to her, so to speak, while she was still alive. But—and I think this is part of your question—I mostly use quotes very deliberately as writing prompts. I mentioned earlier that Charles Wright was one of my teachers as an undergraduate, and I love his work so much. I used some of his lines as prompts for a longer piece. And when I was finished, I realized that the work I had written had outlived the prompts. So I took those lines out, but I put them in the notes. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It's another ghost in the forest.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So, pretty deliberate. And maybe that goes back to your earlier question about living poets and using their work. Yes, it does.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY) It does seem like such an intimate act, you know, engaging with a poet. Is it more comfortable to work with someone who’s dead, and you’re kind of, you know, moving through their work knowing you’re going to talk back to it? Or have you ever sort of collaborated with a living poet in a form and then they had the chance to respond or share their appreciation?

Kimiko Hahn: Yes. I have a chapbook called Dovetail by Slapering Hol Press. And it’s from a series that publishes conversations between two poets. Mine is with Tamiko Beyer, and we had so much fun. (LAUGHS) So she spent many years as a child in Japan. I did, I only spent one year in Japan, but I could speak some Japanese. So she and I were able to go back and forth between memories and our relationship to the language and being mixed. And also different generations. So, we wrote zuihitsu together, and we would pass them back and forth, give each other assignments, pass them back and forth. And in the end, we decided not to give attribution in the body of the chapbook,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Mm, of who was who.

Kimiko Hahn: Who was who, until the end. It was really, really fun.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, that is fun, because also, sometimes when working with someone, it can feel like there’s this third thing. There’s this third presence, right? It’s not you, not me, but it’s something else that’s just sort of happening in between. And then we’re brought to your pages with the voices and presence of both of you.

Kimiko Hahn: Right. It’s nonbinary. (LAUGHS) How about that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. Yeah, it’s that conversation. That sounds beautiful. What an interesting experience. And I think play is so important. And you mentioned that earlier, too, about the play in childhood, that sense of it being just something to try or something to find amusing or interesting or, or strange.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, absolutely.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kimiko Hahn: People don’t play enough.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: People don’t play enough. Even research is a kind of play. Like the questions we ask ourselves.

Kimiko Hahn: Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, people like to say, “Oh, I went down that rabbit hole.” Well,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Exactly.

Kimiko Hahn: I mean, it’s important to come back out, but.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, you needed that night on Wikipedia or whatever it is.

Kimiko Hahn: (LAUGHS) Absolutely.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And do you, when you play with your grandchildren, is there the sense that, I don’t know, that that you can get more into that zone or that they can bring you into a different realm through play?

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, my granddaughter, Ava, who just turned six is a very chatty little girl who’s been exposed to a lot of myths and stories by her mother, Miyako and zombies by her father. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: And monsters. And monsters, in part from her step grandfather, Harold. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: So she is so much fun to talk with and do projects with. And she and I make little chapbooks.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Kimiko Hahn: She’ll draw, here’s the blob coming down from the sky and eating all the people, and drawing pictures. And now she’s beginning to sound out words and write them, write down her own.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: We need to fear this blob that’s coming. We gotta be aware.

Kimiko Hahn: (LAUGHS) Yeah, absolutely. She has one about her mother having turned into a zombie. And the picture she drew for that is one hand coming out of the ground. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow!

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, she’s quite a—

Cindy Juyoung Ok: The implicature.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, yeah. Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it’s interesting, because you are going back to your 20s writing and, you know, kind of reimagining that self and working with that person. And then you’re also having all these conversations and relationships with someone who’s even younger.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: So it’s like all this idea of like, of girlhood. And, and how we grow.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah. And my grandson, who is going on four, it’s so interesting to see how children use and misuse words. I mean, that’s where I am. I love to misuse words. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kimiko Hahn: Because that leads me down a different portal.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It’s different. Yeah, it’s new.

Kimiko Hahn: Marvel, marvelous, Marvel stove. Right? It’s a portal.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes. Yeah, they’re all portals to each other and to other worlds. Well, the word “nothing” I find really interesting as a concept that has come up a lot in your books. Not just kind of, you know, throwing it away, but actually thinking about what is nothing. Dust and gap, but also it always meaning something in our consciousness. Were you ever interested in, like, math and zero and these big philosophical ideas? Or is that just sort of a random pattern that I’ve projected?

Kimiko Hahn: I haven’t been interested in philosophy as an academic pursuit or as a real pursuit, as a deliberate pursuit. Let me put it that way. It’s more in the air that I breathe, I guess. (LAUGHS) And think about. Air. Nothing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: I have thought for a long time—I grew up going to church,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Me too.

Kimiko Hahn: believing that there might be a heaven. And then in high school, I took a sharp turn (LAUGHS) away from that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it’s a nice idea.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah. It’s a nice idea. It’s, in a way, I wish I still had the capacity to believe that, but I don’t. So the question is, then, for me, what happens after death? I don’t know. I don’t believe there’s a heaven. But two things happened to me that were crucial in my thinking about nothing. (LAUGHS) And that is, I had an undergraduate, when I was first beginning to teach. He came in for a conference and said, you know, a friend of his had just died. And we were talking about it. And he said, “Well, wherever he is, I’ll be there someday, too.” And I just thought, that’s amazing. I love that. So I’ve kind of taken that for myself, my own way of thinking. And then fast forward 10 or more years, I lived for many years on the Upper West Side, in a rental in a building that just happened to have a lot of Chinese workers from the restaurants on the Upper West Side, Chinese restaurants. And I moved out and I was walking around Manhattan. And outside OTB, no surprise, (LAUGHS) I see one of these,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Of course.

Kimiko Hahn: one of the old Chinese guys from the building. Yeah, of course. And I wave and we say, Hi, how are you? And he looks at me very seriously, suddenly, and he said, “My wife went home.” And at first I thought, Oh, she went back to China? And then I realized she had died. And I just thought, Yeah, yeah, wherever that is, that’s, you’re going there.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kimiko Hahn: So those two moments are pivotal in my way of thinking about what happens. So I, I believe I’ll be nothing and I’ll be the same nothing as my mother, and maybe as I get older, that won’t be so comforting. (LAUGHS) But right now it is. And so, when I was thinking about the poems that would become more directly elegiac in my book Foreign Bodies, I was thinking specifically about what happens to one, what are remains, and what is dust. And then to really, really move into what dust is, literally and culturally.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And it sounds like both of these stories, there was kind of a geographic question that was coming into play for you, you know, “wherever my friend is,” and, and “went home,” and then thinking of China, but it’s not China. So this kind of sense of like, how do we move? Like, what does it mean to go somewhere? And as dust, we know dust moves in a really different way than a human body. And maybe that kind of flexibility or that kind of scattering is a part of that, of that grief and that understanding.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, I like that. Thank you. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kimiko Hahn: Now I have another poem to write.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: More prompts, more prompts.

Kimiko Hahn: Yes, more prompts.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Let’s hear your newer poem from the magazine, “Not Nothing Again,” a kind of pantoum, but of course, a ghosted one.

Kimiko Hahn:

(READS POEM)

I think of nothing but wind
or the black universe
though we see the sky bestrewn
with stars and planets.

Or see the black universe
as a chest of puzzles and toys
with stars and planets.
A circle with rings.

As if a chest of puzzling toys,
I wonder about my pink bear,
a circus with rings,
and a carousel of armadillos.

I wander with my pink bear.
I think of nothing as wind.
Also, as a carousel of armadillos
and bees strewn across the skies.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I love this poem. There’s so much about the objects that give us contexts, that help us wander, help us wonder and this way we perceive the universe but also can’t. I mean, I have so many questions about all this. But I think one question I would love to share is from a poet, Elisa Gabbert, who gave us a question into the void not knowing who might answer it. It’s very relevant to nothing and what’s going on with this poem. Let’s hear that.

Elisa Gabbert: Hi, this is Elisa Gabbert. I’ve been thinking a lot about holes lately. And so my question into the void is, when was the last time you gazed into a void? And how did it make you feel?

Kimiko Hahn: Well, I’m fortunate to be able to travel outside New York City (LAUGHS) to upstate New York or Long Island where there are fewer lights, and to be able to just stand in one place and look into the sky. And see nothing. I mean, that, all that black, I mean, it is something, obviously, scientists say it’s something. But it’s also so infinite. So never-ending as far as we know. (LAUGHS) That, for me, that would be the void.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: And is that experience of gazing into the sky and into the void a pleasure? Is it a delight? Or is it—because I think of voids as also scary, as something that can be difficult to face.

Kimiko Hahn: It is a pleasure. It is a pleasure, but I had an experience at a planetarium, (LAUGHS) so it wasn’t the real sky, looking in and hearing an astronomer talking about the sky and just suddenly feeling again that Elizabeth Bishop moment, where I just felt a kind of vertigo, frightening. But I was looking at something that wasn’t the real thing. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, but sometimes the mediation or the replication, the reproduction actually makes you realize the scary aspects. I mean, you just feel really small, right, in that kind of a moment where you’re realizing how big everything is or how, how wild and unknown things are. You start to feel like your body is so limited or puny.

Kimiko Hahn: I have a funny story, apropos of nothing,

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) Okay.

Kimiko Hahn: except I thought of it, so you don’t even need to use it. But my husband knows a medical examiner—no surprise—and he was telling my husband, who was giving a lecture on serial killers and was using some art in his PowerPoint. And the medical examiner said, Oh, they are going to be very disturbed by these slides of Goya’s horrible scenes of war. And so my husband and I were talking about that, because, wow, these people see, the most horrible trauma having been done to bodies, and yet looking at the artwork was disturbing. Fascinating, huh?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, it’s got to be something about, like, what’s direct or what you’re used to, versus the art makes you have to acknowledge is it the emotion or like something about the gore, right? It recontextualizes the gore, in a way.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, it recontextualizes it. I like that, yeah.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: I wonder if poetry is like that too, maybe some people who deal with grief all the time or deal with horror would find it difficult to read a poem on the subject or to have to sit with it through language.

Kimiko Hahn: That question brings to mind a graduate student I had a number of years ago. I didn’t realize that he had just lost two children. And his mother was very ill. So he came into the workshop. And again, this is about 15 years ago, before trigger warnings. I assigned three elegiac books, Cornelius Eady’s, You Don’t Miss Your Water, Sharon Olds’s The Father, and Ed Hirsch’s Gabriel. I didn’t realize till several years after that class, when he came and asked me to be his thesis advisor, that he had been furious with me. He was so furious at being asked to read these for class. And then he said to me, “But these books became the most important books that I have ever read. And they are models for what I want to do with my work.” So they were hugely difficult to read. They weren’t even cathartic at that time. But he was able to go through it, and process his own grief on the one hand, but also, these books that give incredible expression to dying and death. And I’m so proud of him (LAUGHS) for being able to do that. And then producing a manuscript, which was really about his mother’s cancer, and yet another death in his life.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: It sounds like that rage came from a place of great mourning. Yeah, and having to acknowledge that and rather than read it sort of evasively, or, or unwillingly, sort of having to directly feel that and move through it was important in that case.

Kimiko Hahn: I’m grateful that he trusted me and the workshop and the texts that I had assigned, and that he would be okay.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Are there certain texts that you continue to assign now or pair together? Or, or has everything changed as you read differently and, you know, teach different students, and just change the way that you engage with poetry over many decades?

Kimiko Hahn: In the past few years, I’ve been using a lot of chapbooks.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That’s amazing. How great for the students and how great for the presses, too.

Kimiko Hahn: So, medium length answer to a short question, (LAUGHS) a number of years ago, I really thought of the chapbook as kind of a vanity publication. It was to promote yourself without the benefit of a publisher doing the production and marketing distribution, to use all those very commercial words. And that was looked at as negative. And then I heard from a CUNY colleague, Lou Asekoff that his students at Brooklyn College were in a DIY celebration of one another, making chapbooks and gifting them to one another at graduation. And it was like I’d been smacked up the side of my head! (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: And I learned how important chapbooks were and are, and will continue to be in the current economy, but also for young people and for experimental writers. So, from that point onward, I spent a lot of time and a lot of money at a AWP in the bookfair, buying chapbooks. Right before the pandemic, I donated about 200 chapbooks to the Queens College Library.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Wow.

Kimiko Hahn: So now we have a chapbook archive.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A chapbook library, amazing.

Kimiko Hahn: Yeah, yeah, we have an archive of over 200. And what I’ve realized now is, and what I’m doing now in a thesis workshop, is that the chapbook approximates the number of pages that their thesis will end up becoming. So, I have a thesis workshop with that’s cross genre. We look at translations, we look at, obviously, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and I try and give them different samples. So, different models. And a chapbook that I and come to find out. my colleague, Roger Sedarat, has used a lot is Sawako Nakayasu’s Say Translation.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yes, from Ugly Duckling Presse.

Kimiko Hahn: From Ugly Duckling Presse. So that’s a text I keep going back to.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: That’s a great one. Yeah, that’s a beautiful one. I guess, to end, I’m going to borrow Elisa Gabbert’s form and move it a bit, which is, you know, what do you think is the kind of opposite of a void? Like when is the last time you experienced or found the sort of anti-void, the non-void? I imagine you looking up at the sky, and seeing the kind of nothingness but also the somethingness. And then maybe looking down at the body, maybe that’s the non-void. Maybe something like the ghost forest, the books you’ve selected from. What is the non-void for you?

Kimiko Hahn: Well, I recently listened to my daughter explaining to (LAUGHS) her six-year-old about molecules. So nothing is absolutely solid, right?

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right!

Kimiko Hahn: So, my, my brain is a void right now. But the first thing I thought it was probably tripping and falling or something. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS)

Kimiko Hahn: And the concrete, literally.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kimiko Hahn: You know, there’s that.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Earth.

Kimiko Hahn: It’s concrete, Earth. A real book, as opposed to the virtual book.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah.

Kimiko Hahn: There’s a good comparison between the void (LAUGHS) and the concrete, the material page.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Chapbooks are a great example of that, because so much goes into the presses’ decisions and the author’s need of how things need to look on the page and how things need to feel physically.

Kimiko Hahn: I had a craft class, just on the chapbook. And part of the assignment was to respond to the experience of reading the chapbook. And some students really got into it, like, “Oh, the paper or the vellum, or the staples,”

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right. The font,

Kimiko Hahn: The font, all of it. And you can feel the font, if it’s a hand letterpress.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Right.

Kimiko Hahn: So, absolutely the physicality of a chapbook is amazing.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah, and I think it will be similar physicality to hold your selected poems, you know, of seeing all your new poems with going chronologically and flipping the pages and moving further and further back into the past will also be that kind of embodied experience, I hope.

Kimiko Hahn: I hope so. I hope it’s not a void. (LAUGHS)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: (LAUGHS) It’ll be the opposite of a void.

Kimiko Hahn: Thank you.

Cindy Juyoung Ok: Yeah. And I think we need both about the voids and the non-void. So, thank you so much for sharing about all the extremes, all the quietnesses, all the forms, the gatherings. I really appreciate it and congrats again on the prize.

Kimiko Hahn: Thank you, and thank you so much for your attention and focus and care.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Cindy Juyoung Ok: A lifetime appreciation for Kimiko Hahn. Kimiko’s most recent collection is Foreign Bodies from W.W. Norton in 2020. She teaches at Queens College, City University of New York and is the recipient of the 2023 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a recognition for outstanding lifetime achievement from the Poetry Foundation. You can read a folio of her poetry as well as an essay on the glosa form in the October 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. 10 book-length issues for $20. Visit poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer to subscribe. That’s poetrymagazine.org/podcastoffer. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster dePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Thanks also to Elisa Gabbert and Dana Isokawa. Until next time, with congrats to Kimiko, as well as the molecules and the myths that make us, thanks for listening.