Helen Gu

The Interview

Your poems seem to share a questioning stance on identity, as if in an ongoing act of self-discovery. Is this intentional?

I don’t think this is intentional in my poetry; rather, my entire worldview is defined by a tenuous view on self-identity. Often, my poetry becomes a reflection on my psyche and thus writing is a form of deep introspection. I see my poetry as a conversation with the self—most of my writing attempts to grapple with a fundamental question that haunts me, whether through a deeply personal experience or a fictional scenario inspired by my life’s events. I find myself constantly questioning the basis of my existence and the concept of identity, and I think that I would not be a poet if I knew the answers.

The notions of womanhood and body ownership are at the forefront of this work. How do you feel about these topics as a poet, especially considering the recent tragic loss of reproductive rights here in the U.S.?

I have always been fascinated with the relationship between female identity and the body.

Throughout history, the concept of a woman has been defined by her body: who owns it, how it presents itself, its functions and obligations. My relationship with my own body is complicated. I’ve always found the concept of physicality strange, and a lot of my poetry is me grappling with physical existence and all the physical and emotional burdens that it carries.

As a young woman living in the United States, I am deeply afraid of what the recent election means for me and other women and marginalized individuals out there. I am only a teenager, and my country is changing in a direction that I cannot recognize. Sometimes, the notion of being a woman brings me immense dread. I will never understand the hatred that some people have just because someone was born different in a world where existence and fulfillment are already never a given.

The use of Chinese words in “女” is fascinating. How did you plan this poem to incorporate it?

Chinese is interesting in that certain characters can be both words in themselves and roots for other words. “女” is one such word: on its own it means “woman,” but it can be paired with other characters to form new words with new meanings. In elementary school, my Chinese teacher taught us this character and a few words derived from this root, and I distinctly remember that I was taught the character 好, “good,” as a synthesis between woman and son (子). Recently, I have been curious about all the other characters out that that derived from this root because the ones I already know tend to have very gendered meanings. After doing some research on this root in particular, the word that inspired this poem was the character 妻 (wife): its etymology comes from the synthesis between the words 肀女, literally meaning to grab a woman by the hair to prevent her from escaping, a tribute to the forced marriages many women went through in ancient China. This poem is above all a definition of womanhood and I think that the Chinese characters do a great job in piecing together a societal projection of what womanhood is supposed to entail. It was both fun and eye-opening to research the roots and meanings of all these characters as a lens to how we define women.

How do you balance so well both Chinese and American cultures, using the language of one to reflect experiences from the other? Is this something that came naturally to you or was it a struggle to ensure both cultural specificity and universality?

Tapping into both Chinese and American cultures comes pretty naturally to me. I’ve found that I don’t really define my identity by one or the other, and therefore when I write about my own experiences, I tend to explore my identity through both. Growing up in a state with a relatively high Asian American population, I never felt singled out for my identity. I think that it is because of this prevalent subculture, though, that I struggle to connect with truly Chinese or truly American values.

Beyond my culture, I tend to define myself by my personhood: my disconnect with the self, my constant existential dread, and all the uncertainties that make my poetry more universal to beyond my specific culture. Through my writing, I’ve found that a lot of things that define a particular culture are much more universal than we think of it to be, and different cultures just come up with their own ways of grappling with human struggles. For example, in my poem “女,” though I make my point through specific Chinese characters, the idea still rings true throughout most patriarchal societies.

Can you walk us through the process of composing your structurally unique poem “how to write end credits,” in particular how you decided which numbered items would blend into the following items without periods?

The poem “how to write end credits” was one of my more spur-of-the-moment poems, and it is a first draft that I wrote in one sitting. A while before drafting the actual poem, I was suddenly inspired to write down a few lines in the poem—the lines “I am always yearning for something else — one more week to live, one last exhale. One more word wrung from my mother’s mouth” and “Overhead, the sun slips under its lifeline” had been sitting in my notebook for a while. I wanted to write this poem as a post-apocalyptic-esque musing on the concept of existence. I used a lot of images and motifs that sum up how I view my own life and imminent death, and this poem eventually became a dreamlike merging of my own memories and visions.

I’m not quite sure about how to define the voice in the poem; this piece came from too deep in my subconscious for me to explain what everything means. Perhaps the speaker is how I imagine myself to be postmortem, or it is simply the narration within my mind. Certain images, such as the dead squirrel and my aunt’s deathbed, are real-life events, while others, like the couple on the sidewalk in this poem’s fifteenth section, are fictional. I think that I placed these images together in a single narrative to signify my tenuous view of reality. Furthermore, there are sixteen sections in the and that number is meant to signify my age. This is just one of my little Easter eggs in my own poetry that, out of context, only I understand.

From classic couplets to poems without any capitalization, from numbered lists to intriguingly inconsistent indenting, you employ such a variety of poetic structures. How do you select which structure to use and when to shift into or away from more traditional visual forms?

I tend to define my form based on what my poem wants to say, if that makes sense. When I write poetry, I don’t consciously choose a form to write in; rather, I do whatever feels right to me in terms of the poem’s narrative voice. For example, my poem “in the mirror, i am” is the only poem that is entirely lowercase. I felt like the voice of that poem required lightness and airiness as the poem borrows much of its imagery from the classic fairytale “Cinderella”; furthermore, I chose to write the piece in couplets due to the juxtaposition of intimacy and distance that fundamentally defines the piece. Likewise, I used traditional capitalization and alternate indents for the poem “Self-Portrait As Botched Rhinoplasty” because that piece’s rhythmic demands are in a way opposite to that of “in the mirror, i am”: if the latter poem is defined by mythical creatures and ballroom dancing, the former contains defined scaffolding and grounded textures.

Sometimes, certain forms also make or break a piece for me. I originally wrote “Abecedarian As Last Supper” as all lowercase and absolutely hated it—there was something that felt incomplete or lackluster in that piece that capitalization immediately fixed. Looking back, I think that this is because that piece needed to feel much more urgent and demanding than I wrote it to be. I try to be as in-touch as possible with the narrative voices of my poetry to determine which forms to use, and usually, my poetic structures come to me naturally that way.