Pai

It impacted me on practical, as well as aesthetic and philosophical levels. Before Tomo was born, I had more time to write every day. The center of my life was something that I could control. Raising a small child has required putting projects on the back burner and coming back to them later. Or developing approaches to making work that can be more spontaneous, or just short term. If I was working on a book, it might take three to four years to finish. If it was a short responsive poem or commission—a quick one-off—those seemed more doable.


How I practiced as a writer shifted in having this new person in my life who was experiencing so many things for the first time.  My apple orchard project Heirloom came about at a time when my son was beginning to develop language. I wanted to write a long poem about the place that we both loved to visit together to create an embodied memory for him—eating the apples, walking the land, and making language visible on these ripening apple skins, so that the language could be beautiful and tactile for him to engage his imagination and eye. That project came a year after hardly any writing. It was very much informed by thinking about my son’s relationship to language first.


Likewise, when I worked for the City of Redmond making an animated poem projection, Tomo was a little bit older. I was beginning to introduce him to PBS and educational cartoons. He was hypnotized by the moving image.  The visual seemed like a powerful way to capture the imagination of a mass audience. To get somebody to slow down and look, before reading.  Those were the big ways in which my child coming into my life spurred change.


Before Tomo was born, I began writing personal essays about my family of origin and my parents’ native country, and the urgency to capture some of those stories has a lot to do with wanting to write down the legacy of my parents and to define for Tomo what his relationship to his ancestors and his Taiwanese-ness can be—so that he can know it and not feel that it’s gone when his grandparents pass away.

I really appreciated how much you bring your personal life into the pages of Ensō, allowing the reader to see your creative path as inseparable from your life as a daughter, spouse, and mother. What was it like for you, putting that personal material into this book—including writing about historical family trauma, miscarriage, and the challenges of marriage?

As writers, we write the work that we do. Then someone else historicizes it in some scholarly context; it’s different than say, artists who contribute a piece to an exhibit and write an artist’s statement reflecting on their own work. For me, that desire to include the personal has a lot to do with this process that changes and evolves and for me. I’m often thinking about what is going on in my life, or around me and impacting the thing I’m making. Those things are really important and capture a particular snapshot in time. Pulling together some of the essays for Ensō, I digitized 20 years of photographs from different projects. I looked into old handwritten journals that I’d kept over decades to consider what I was thinking about or what was happening in my life. Why did I decide to print words on apples? I read an article in The New York Times on genetically modified apples. And it engaged my thinking about the heirloom orchard as, as a place that can hardly even exist anymore.


The aspiration for Ensō was to make that practice more transparent to people who have known my work. Many people know my work in the context of oh, she writes a lot about visual arts, and ekphrastic poetry, or she’s an Asian American poet—whatever that means—or I have my work anthologized in a couple of Buddhist poetry anthologies. People may understand or perceive my work in specific ways and my practice has been bigger than that for a long time. Somebody who sees me perform a piece on a stage may not know that I have this other practice that is grounded in making objects, or that I have made public art. I felt like it was important for me to put that in context for myself to understand my evolution as an artist. Secondary to that would be that I would love for my readers to have a better understanding of what my practice looks like.

Borsuk

I think it really does that. You talked about the way that an artist approaches sharing their work publicly, that so much of that practice does involve contextualizing the work, whereas we’re used to, in the creative writing world, this kind of silencing of the writer.

Pai

Right, yes.

Borsuk

It makes sense that you bring that to this project, given that you have a background in both the arts and creative writing.  I’m curious whether—as someone who went through an MFA in creative writing within the context of an art school (at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago)—you found the creative writing workshop amenable to the kind of expanded work that you’re doing. Did you find a space for your voice in it, or did you have to look elsewhere for mentors and peers for the kind of work you’re trying to accomplish?

Pai

I transferred to SAIC from the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. I had one year of an MFA behind me when I decided that I wanted to explore writing in an art school environment. I was part of the second or third graduating class of writing students, and entered SAIC at a time when the writing program hadn’t established its identity. It had these teachers who were local to Chicago, who wrote in fairly conventional modes. And so there wasn’t a lot of innovation of form amongst this group of particular writers. Those evolutions would happen in the program later with the changes that Beth Nugent made as program chair, including the hire of Bin Ramke. I spent a lot of my time in the photography department. I studied with Joyce Neimanas and Aimee Beaubien who were both photographers working in collage. I also worked with Robert Clarke Davis who made images with the Holga, a toy camera.


I met the artist Larry Lee through one of my instructors, and he became an important colleague to me. Larry introduced me to Teresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. Larry treated me like a peer from the get-go, and it was powerful, to be regarded in that way—not as somebody who was going through their training, but as somebody who had ideas that could be brought into his own creative process to make works together. We made a video installation in the early 2000s at Gallery 2. He had given me a Chinese-English phrase book from the 1800s and told me to do something with it. I wasn’t sure what to do. Archives weren’t yet a part of my way of working. But I read this phrase book. And I thought, these things that are being translated are strange and violent and reflective of the 1800s and the time in which these Chinese immigrants were arriving. So I ended up cutting up the text and collaging it together, making this kind of narrative about the person who would be using this particular phrase book. Larry took pre-John Wayne era spaghetti Western footage and cut it up and then overlaid the text with it. He built some saloon doors inside the gallery, and put these pedestals on either side of the doors with these TVs that were talking to each other in the Wild West.


In my writing workshops we didn’t study Asian American writers in any significant way. Li-Young Lee lived in town. But no one was reading or talking about avant-garde Asian American writers like Theresa Cha. Larry, being outside the department, was incredibly important to me. The community outside of SAIC too, the art galleries and the museums and the caliber of artists living and practicing in Chicago, were important. Within the SAIC community, just the ability to go in as a creative writer, but if I wanted my thesis to include photography or textiles or film or whatever I wanted to make, that was all really encouraged. I don’t think they’d quite gotten it right at that point in terms of how to connect writing students to teachers in other discipline—it just wasn’t structured in a way that made sense. But I think I got out of it what I needed.

Borsuk

It sounds sort of like you made your own path through the degree by reaching outward from what might have seemed like a more traditional MFA program into the other art forms that were happening all around you and available.

Pai

Exactly. I do regret not taking a textile class while I was there, or taking a book-making class. I needed to finish the degree and get out of debt, and I didn’t want to linger. In retrospect, it was a once-in-a-lifetime kind of opportunity. It’s unlikely I’ll live in Chicago again, so I do regret that. But there were other pressing things happening in my life.

Borsuk

In Virga you address quite directly the ways in which both your Buddhist instructors and your former teachers failed you. In the poem “All Beings Our Teachers,” you speak about your own experiences with teachers who tried to take advantage of you physically, financially, and psychologically. You write, “For many years, my best teachers were books.” What have you gleaned about teaching from those experiences of teachers who have fallen short?

Pai

The era in which I went through undergraduate and graduate school, which was like 20-25 years ago, was such a different time. People weren’t talking about critical race theory, or diversity, equity, and inclusion in recruitment and enrollment, or addressing these inequalities in curriculum. The #MeToo movement hadn’t happened. There were a lot of things that weren’t talked about in classrooms, in particular the dynamics of power between teachers and students and the dangers, impacts, and consequences of dual relationships. I think that poem is very much about expressing the different kinds of harm that those power structures enacted on me.


I end up interacting with students quite a bit. Young people who think there’s a particular path to becoming a poet. Or that association with particular poets may be advantageous. Who’s going to nominate you for that prize or who’s going to be your mentor. I’ve wanted for a long time to write a longer personal essay about the difficulties of what happens when a bad mentor enters your life. Who, instead of being able to see the best in you and what’s possible in your work, project their garbage onto you. Or try to mold you in their image because of their own failings or ego. This is not something that students or teachers are taught to navigate. As an adjunct, I felt aware that my students were very vulnerable. And that vulnerability showed up in their poems. One woman who came to my undergraduate writing workshop wrote about her eating disorder. Talking about the poems became treacherous terrain because it meant talking about material that was emotionally fraught for this young woman. I had another student who did not come to class regularly. He eventually confessed to me that he was living in his car and homeless. He was a former Israeli military cadet who would visit me in my office to talk about his failing grades and to let me know in no uncertain terms that I needed to pass him so that he could finish his degree. He wrote about his military experiences and that trauma. There were so many risks involved in attempting to meet these students where they needed to be met.


The poem “All Beings Our Teachers” was this place where I could work out what I wish had happened differently. Naming the thing that did happen. And knowing that the damage that was done was not damage that I have to own for the rest of my life. There are things that happened to me that impacted my career. At Naropa, I had a teacher who allowed his partner, the director of our program, to believe that we had an affair. I was too young to understand how that might impact my career as an Asian American woman poet starting out in the world. I had no idea. I felt an affinity for this particular teacher’s work. Years later, when he was no longer with that partner, he was excommunicated from Naropa because he had begun a relationship with a student. From a distance, I saw how she was ostracized from that community and the general poetry community. I could take a step back and realize that I had suffered the impacts of people believing certain things about me. Now I’m older and I feel bolder in honoring what’s been true to my own experience. And that makes those things speakable.

Borsuk

That really comes through in the poem, that you’re not going to be bullied anymore.

Pai

Yeah.

Borsuk

And you’re also not going to let other people, especially mentors, claim you as their property: I taught her, I was her teacher. There’s that possessiveness that you talk about in the poem.

Pai

In an enlightened relationship, you would want your students to go off and do their own thing and be their own people. Without taking credit.

Borsuk

Since we’re talking about how you find artistic community as a writer, where you developed your lineage and sought out other paths for your creative practice, given the environments you found yourself in both at Naropa and then later at SAIC, maybe a nice place to move next would be to talk about the role of community in your work.

Pai

Naropa modeled ways of being in community that influenced the way that I wanted to participate in community. A lot of my peers were learning letterpress and publishing one another—and there was this generosity. Publication, in some ways, became very accessible because there was this community that was just going to bootstrap it and do it. It didn’t have to be difficult or challenging or esoteric. There were means of production that were available. That really influenced my feeling about the ways in which artists, to my mind, should be in community with one another.


There is a very rich breadth of poets here in Seattle. But I feel like the people that are important to me often are musicians and visual artists working in other disciplines. I enjoy being in conversation with poets, and the similarities and processes and challenges that we may encounter. But I enjoy thinking in expansive ways. Recently, I’ve worked with radio producers on making a podcast for KUOW on stories told through personal objects. That project has put me in conversation with many visual artists, musicians, and composers.

Borsuk

Yes! The Blue Suit is a must-listen show. In each episode, you delve into an object of significance, often an unlikely one, that has changed its bearer’s life in profound ways. The episode in which artist Etsuko Ichikawa discusses vitrified glass from the Hanford Nuclear Site here in Washington gave me chills. Each episode is constructed with such care—I love your storytelling and the ways you draw out your guests (including my brilliant colleague Anida Yoeu Ali). You are soon to launch a new series, “Ten Thousand Things with Shin Yu Pai.” How did this new season arise, and what will it cover?

Pai

We decided to evolve The Blue Suit and to rename the podcast Ten Thousand Things so that it could be more clear that the focus of the podcast is on things or objects, and so the title could also give a nod towards my cultural origins as a person of the Chinese diaspora and a poet. The number ten thousand is often used in Chinese culture to express the vast, the infinite, or the unfathomable, which is another way to think about all the permutations of Asian American identity. My guests in Season 2 include fly fisherman and conservationist Dylan Tomine, literary activist Shawn Wong on publishing No-No Boy, novelist Donna Miscolta talking about the time capsule her daughter hid in their house, and disability activist Alice Wong on losing her voice.

Borsuk

Have there been any moments in your interviews that caught you off-guard or surprised you? Things that changed the story you thought you were telling?

Pai

I was delighted to learn that the novelist Shawn Wong started out as a poet. But his poems were really long. Like 20 pages long. With dialogue. And his teachers thought he should take an extra year and focus instead on prose. He couldn’t be like Asian American Allen Ginsberg.

There are always moments of surprise in the conversations. I really didn’t expect to feel anything in common with a hardcore fly fisherman who pursued steelhead trout for decades as his passion. I’ve never been fishing. But really his obsession with fishing has a lot of common with my passion for writing.  

Borsuk

Do you have any favorite episodes in Season 2?

Pai

Talking to Eason Yang about surviving cancer, cultural silences, and Chinese parents was an incredible conversation. I also loved crafting an episode around Alice Wong, who communicates using a text to voice app that outputs her words in an unaccented female Midwestern voice named Heather. We’re doing a third season too and begin production this Fall.

Borsuk

I can’t wait to hear these conversations.  So much of your work has involved amplifying the voices of others and helping bring invisible stories (of objects, people, and places) to light. How did that aspect of your practice develop?

Pai

Reaching back to SAIC, that’s when I began my practice of ekphrastic writing. It wasn’t as a result of taking a class or learning the technique, it just seemed very natural to study objects in the museum environment. It was the second classroom that I was in every day. After that I spent about a year working for the Dallas Museum of Art as a manager of docent education, and had that experience of working firsthand with curators and art historians and deepened that interest in researching and learning more about the stories of the objects.


About 15 years ago, I came to school at the University of Washington. Initially, for the Socio-Cultural Anthropology program. I wanted to explore the techniques that Bhanu Kapil was adopting, to use ethnographic practices in my poetry. But what the anthro program was teaching was very different. The trajectory of a scholar was very different from the things that were important to me.  I left it to do Museum Studies instead, with the idea that museums as institutions are places that also practice ethnography and oral history but in community-based contexts outside of academia. The Anthropology department was not my tribe, but the museum people felt like home.


I had these teachers who were journalists and public historians—Lorraine McConaghy and MOHAI, and Ron Chew, and Tom Ikeda of the Densho Project who created a visual and audio archive of survivors of the Japanese incarceration experience—and I had these teachers who were very much about capturing stories, whereas previously I’d been working a lot with objects. It was about capturing these personal, lived experiences and stories that could then augment the photography or the archives, the maps, the historical documents. That became a strategy. I wouldn’t say that I work in the documentary poetic mode in the way that poets like Kaia Sand do so well, but that it is an incredibly important part of my creative practice, the research part of it, whether or not it’s apparent. I think it’ll be more apparent in personal essays that I write but less so in poetry.


I’ve also worked in archives after leaving Seattle after finishing the Museum Studies degree. I worked as Acquisitions Curator at the Wittliff Collections outside of Austin, Texas and that was a really important experience, too, in realizing that archives represent the interests and the collection scope of the people that drive them or control them. In that case, a founding donor established that collection—set the collecting scope. How the Southwest was defined was quite narrow. So archives, as this kind of living thing that can evolve and should evolve because they are research collections, finding ways to then use the budgets, I had to be very strategic in diversifying the archives to include more people of color, women, LGBTQ writers and being really aware of what is and isn’t represented, what’s left out.

Borsuk

Which is such an important question when it comes to the archive. It has this kind of authority conferred on it, and there’s this assumption that if it’s in the archive that’s history, that’s fact.

Pai

Canonical yes.

Borsuk

This relates to how Michael Long describes Ensō in the preface, as “an attempt to teach us how to extend poetry beyond the page as part of a publicly-engaged collaborative and multimedia practice.” In fact, you are working both for and beyond the page at the same time—you’ve published Ensō, an artist’s book, and Virga, a more traditional-looking, though still innovative, book of poems within a year. Can you talk a little bit about how these two practices complement one another?

Pai

I think a lot of this comes back to identity formation in a way. Being the daughter of immigrant parents, I didn’t have a common language really with my mother. When I was starting out as a poet at Naropa I started out translating Chinese and Spanish texts. My mother is a visual artist, and I talk about her in Ensō as well and her impact on my desire to create a language in which we could both communicate. I think of the multiplicity of my interest as being in some ways reflections of different aspects of my identity that then have to be expressed, whatever the form.


I practiced Buddhism for 23 years. I took vows of refuge back in 1998, and those poems are going to reflect themselves as very quiet narrative poems on a page. At the same time, when I was a young adult, you know high school, I did a lot of singing in choral and jazz ensembles and was very interested in music and bombed a music school audition, which crushed me. It took me a long time to come back to the idea that my voice could be activated in a way that could elevate the poems and the way that I wanted them to be heard, but that didn’t have to be about the beauty or the perfectness of the voice. It was about something else.


There are these many different forms of expression that are available, and that in the way that immigrants, children of immigrants do a certain amount of code-switching, putting on and taking off masks, adapting fluidly to the environments in which they are that becomes a kind of survival strategy, but it’s also a very creative strategy. There’s a parallel for the ways in which I reach out to other forms. And I’ll say that in the forms that I practice, I will never be an expert. I will never be a master letterpress printer and you know, at best, I may be able to sing on pitch. I may never get the beats right or read the music perfectly. But practice, the idea of practice—setting the type, making the imprint on the page, setting one’s mind and aspiration to making the best thing that you can—these things are qualities that I bring to whatever medium I’m approaching. And also the project of iteration—translating the photograph into a poem or a poem into stage performance or a stage performance into a video piece. These are all things that make a lot of sense to my practice, or the way in which creativity lives in me.

Borsuk

That sense of practice and iteration comes through in both Ensō and Virga as a devotional quality—a quality of attention. In “Devotion,” the invocation that opens Ensō, you write about an exhibition of Wolfgang Laib’s work where you picked up a little ball of wax off of the floor and saved it in your own shrine—a “keepsake activated and sanctified so long ago.” I’m curious if you see devotion as part of your creative practice when it comes to working with nature, creating works that are destined to disintegrate or exist beyond your control, or even in “Poems for an Aeolian Harp,” in Virga, a series of haiku that instruct us in ways of noting the wind, which to me bespeaks a kind of deeply caring attention that feels related to meditation.

Pai

The ways in which Buddhism, Buddhist interests, are expressed in my work—I want the poems that I write to be mirrors of my mind and as close to a lived experience, like the immediacy of a lived experience as a person actually having that experience. So in that way, the poems are very connected to nature, sometimes grounded in nature, the immediacy of a feeling that I’m trying to capture before it transmutes into something else. That quality of the Buddhist sensibility is about that relationship to what’s fleeting, what’s beautiful, what I want to grasp onto, these kinds of moments that are interrelated for a reader so that they can reverberate.


To the other question of the devotional—I had made these notes, as I was thinking about that little beeswax ball, which I think I still have, yeah I still have it, and it still smells really great.


It wasn’t just important to me that the artist’s hands had touched this part of the material. In some ways it was more interesting to me that bees had produced that material out of many hours of labor. Important to Buddhism and other Eastern practices is a relationship to lineage or to a kind of living history, history of ancestors that continues through a line. In taking that ball of wax I felt like it was expressive of that lineage. It had come from bees and then it had been used by this artist to create this monolithic pyramid structure in the galleries.


Seeing that material makes me think a little bit of the training that I received in tea ceremony when I was at Naropa. In the context of Japanese tea there’s a lot of ritualized movements and scripts in terms of what is said, what is looked at, what is talked about, what is regarded. Those things often revolve around the tea ceramic or the tea itself. The thing that the teachers were trying to impart were often yes, that green powdered tea arrived in this can from Japan and this is what you’re going to be serving to your guests; but think about the long way that it had to journey; think about the people that had to harvest and process it; and before that the planting of the tea and the sunshine and elements that came to bring that tea into being before it could become the substance that is here in front of you. That relationship to the origin and an awareness of the energetic forces that had to come together in order to bring something into nascency. That’s why it made sense for that beeswax to become the totem for me.


I could imagine somebody reading that essay of mine and being like, why did she scrape off wax from the floor? Recently, I read a review about Nina Simone’s Gum. It’s this book by a musician who saw Nina Simone perform in London at her very last concert that she gave in England. And he was just floored by her performance. He saw that before she gave her performance she took some chewing gum out of her mouth and stuck it on the piano in this towel. He snuck up on stage after the concert and he took this gum and kept it for 20 years. It’s cast in sculpture. It’s not the fetishization of the object, for me. For me the beeswax is anonymous in some ways. That’s something I’ve been really interested in exploring in my work as well, like the work around monuments. Who builds them? Or ancient sculptures and the collections in the Taipei National Museum, this meat stone or this jade cabbage. They’re these beautiful, iconic carvings and treasures of the museum, but they were nameless artisans that made them—they’re unattributed. There’s something about honoring all of the labor that went into that before it became the thing.

Borsuk

That’s so beautiful and really connects with the notion of activation too. Artwork being activated can have a few different meanings, but it does seem like with the wax, it activated something for you. It also is activated by the presence of the audience, it’s activated by the artist’s contextualizing it. Do you think about activation with respect to your work, particularly when it is installation and community based?

Pai

I think about the piece that I made for the Arts in Nature Festival in West Seattle at Camp Long. There was this handheld View-Master child’s toy, in which a reel is placed. If you advance it, you click through the lines of a poem that appear as a palimpsest telling the story of Longfellow Creek, which had been a body of water that had run across that land but had been buried over and then re-daylighted at a certain point. It’s kind of mirroring the land. That was a piece where that interaction with the visitor coming into that cabin and looking was really important—the idea of them completing that. Camp Long is this former Boy Scouting camp where you can rent cabins and they’re really rustic. I worked with a friend of mine who’s a sound engineer to make recordings of Longfellow Creek, which we installed in the cabin so that somebody can come in and view the View-Master but also hear the sounds of the creek running through.


I think that activation happens in different ways. The listening that’s required of being a poetry audience member, that’s one level of it, but I think that how we listen to sound or music is actually different from how we listen to language. The tools are the structures, the ways in which people interact with the objects. Sometimes it is still going to be the reading of an object, whether it’s a poem printed on a glow-in-the-dark balloon that flies in the sky or it’s poetry embroidery. Really interacting with that material and thinking about why is this poem on a piece of fabric versus printed on a piece of paper? Those are things that I’m very interested in in terms of the activation of the imagination.

Borsuk

I like that a lot, the idea of the “activation of the imagination.” It’s not simply that the viewer’s presence completes the work, but that it lives on in their imagination—goes in another direction. That’s really beautiful.

The View-Master slide reel is such a microscopic, intimate form, but you’ve also worked at a hugely expanded scale with work printed on a city bike path, for example, or projected on the side of buildings. Both of those ways of working—the micro and the macro—take away the page as poetry’s point of reference. We’re not tethered to this 8.5 x 11-inch or half-sheet-sized way of thinking. Changing the scale then makes the body itself the point of reference. I’m curious if you think about embodiment when you’re working in this way.

Pai

I think about the experience of the viewer or reader and how they’re encountering that text. Embodiment is probably an easier way to say it, but yeah I think about the user experience: how they’re handling the poem, what happens if somebody advanced it a couple of frames but then they put it down and you have to reset it, is it confusing if they pick it up at that point, or is there a way in which it makes sense? With the bike trails in Redmond there is a level of activation in which water—rain—has to be poured over the concrete in order for it to be fully activated. I wanted to make it in such a way that some text is always visible and makes sense, but there’s this other layer that exists as well.


So I think the embodiment experience that I think of in making those works is often about the sense of touch and the sense of moving around a text or an object. Historically, as a visual artist, I tend to privilege the visual just like in my poems I tend to focus on visual imagery and objects and artworks. It’s been important to push that practice so that I am thinking about the embodied experiences of being in this cabin and hearing the creek flowing through and what does that feel like? Or if you’re in a crowd of 10,000 people at a civic festival, do you really want to hear somebody read a poem from a stage? No. You do not. I learned that at my first Redmond Lights Festival. These people just want Christmas carols and to decorate cookies, and they don’t want to hear my poetry—and that’s fine! Maybe I want to make some poetry balloons that children—my son—get to take home. Or the next year, because there are 10,000 people outdoors on a rainy day, that we want to project a poem on the building in a loop, so that they can just watch it when they feel like it and get the suggestion that it’s about an initiative about a tree canopy through the shaping of the concrete poetry and make their own connections. I think: what will that reading experience be?

Borsuk

That leads me to want to ask you about how working as poet laureate of Redmond may have changed your sense of what it is that poetry and poets can be and do. I particularly was thinking about that poem that you mentioned earlier called “Same Cloth,” which is dedicated to Leona Coakley-Spring, who closed her consignment shop after a deeply racist incident in which she received a Klan rope among some anonymous donations. You hand stitched this poem on silk organza in red thread, and it has this beautiful tactility. In the end of that poem you call on the community to recover some deeper meaning of clan. I’m curious about how working in this way, as a poet laureate deeply engaged with your audience, thinking about how to bring them into the text, may have changed what you want your poetry to do.

Pai

“Same Cloth” was machine stitched. I hired a fabricator to make it.  So I want to give credit where credit’s due. But yes, I came up with the idea and knew how I wanted it to feel. But this idea of does poetry matter, how does it matter, to whom does it matter, why does it matter? Those were the big questions of my laureateship. And they were ones I already had, definitely, because there are lots of different ways to be poets in the world.


There are people who just want to write and are personas who may not actually be who they are in their poems. Not everybody is interested in civic engagement or the capacity of poetry to create or facilitate social change. I wanted to use that couple of years to ask myself those questions and to see where I arrived. The lessons that I learned were that poetry often feels inaccessible or unimportant to the public. When the mayor appointed me poet laureate, there was a community member at the pronouncement who writes op-eds for the paper. He couldn’t understand why a portion of the city’s budget should go to funding a poet laureateship when that money could fix potholes.  I think it’s important as a poet to know that sometimes we think the stakes are really high or they’re high in our work, but for others, they may be inconsequential.


I do have this deep-seated belief that poetry can change people’s minds and hearts one person at a time. For two years, I produced a poetry podcast with Town Hall called Lyric World. One thing I always asked my guests was, what do you think is the role of the poet in society or the capacity of poetry to impact society? And that’s something that poets always have thoughtful answers to. We don’t see enough conversations about poetry’s capacity to facilitate healing or to create conversations around difficult dialogues. But I think it is something that people are turning to more and more.

Borsuk

The notion that poetry has the capacity for change—one person at a time—speaks to a vision that is at the same time grand in scale and extremely personal—a vision present in the sequence “Tidal” from Virga. Those poems simultaneously address Buddhism, motherhood, and interstellar life—so they have both the individual and the wider perspective within them. Recently the sequence was made into a series of videopoems by the award-winning filmmaker and media artist David Ian Bickley. I’d love to hear more about that collaboration, how it came about, and what you think about those poems when you experience them as films.

Pai

David was an unexpected gift of the pandemic. I had juried a poetry film contest for Slippery Elm journal. A few weeks later, they made the announcement that they had given the prize, and I got this tag on Instagram, which I spend very little time on. It was the filmmaker, David, who had collaborated with the poet and a team of people. I don’t know all the social media protocols, and so I was like I really loved your poem, it was great, I loved your video, it is lovely. He asked if I might like to collaborate. We arranged a video call to get to know each other.


He wanted to make a piece about tides as a metaphor for describing Buddhist notions of Karma, or cause and effect. The life that a person is fated with, and how we navigate those waters that we can’t control. I started writing the piece. The first two parts were about this idea of reincarnation and being stuck in a loop like the wheel of suffering, or being stuck in the pattern of swimming these currents in a pool in which you can’t break free into open water.


In the middle of working on the poem, I got a karmic gut punch about an evolving health issue that could have developed into cancer if unaddressed. It shattered whatever vision or attachment I had to what the poem would be because suddenly it became very personal. It wasn’t just this abstract notion of Karma. It was this real experience of being in that water and not knowing if I would be able to swim my way to safety.


So I let David know that. I let him know I might not deliver the poem on time. And I might not want to finish it until after my medical procedure to be able to arrive at the place where the poem needed to arrive, because it was evolving. So I had surgery and spent a couple of months recovering. I finished the poem.  It felt like completing a circle of difficulty in my life and in my health and was reflective of all those themes that my collaborator had asked for, but came from that embodied emotional spiritual place where I feel like I was very much in the poem. It is a piece that remains extremely personal in the scope of what is in this new collection.

Borsuk

It does feel deeply personal. There is something about the recordings of your voice, coupled with the imagery—which sometimes seems aquatic and at other times celestial—that makes me feel unmoored. You mentioned that it’s a product of the pandemic and, in fact, there seem to be a number of poems in Virga that are really rooted in the historic moment that we’re living through, including a poem in which you address the increasing violence against Asians and Asian Americans in this country—where you tell your son, “stop telling people that we’re Chinese.” Was a lot of this work written relatively recently?

Pai

There were maybe a handful of poems that were written before the pandemic, but most of it was written during. The opening poem is about sitting zazen over Zoom. This book is very much about our socio-political times. There’s a poem in there that’s about the Women’s March and its impact on the Asian American Community in the days before Lunar New Year, when the march took place, and its impact on the economy of the International District. As you mentioned, also the poem in which I invoke to my son that we have to be careful about how we publicly identify. He’s very proud of his Chinese heritage and his Taiwanese family. I wanted to write that poem as a way of saying something about the way in which, right now, it’s important to code switch to survive—more than hiding or being in shame—knowing that decisions have to be made about our liberties and about how we express ourselves in the world, because it’s not a safe world right now.

Borsuk

It’s a powerful lesson and I think it’s a testament to the vision of the book that it feels really connected to what’s happening right now while holding space for a longer historical moment that we could even say is represented by “virga” itself as this transmutation of rain between states as it comes down from the sky.

Pai

Yes, virga as, the state of potentiality that’s unrealized.

Borsuk

I like that, unrealized potentiality. We talked before about haiku, attention, and devotional practice. You have a forthcoming book of haiku, Less Desolate, in collaboration with Justin Rueff, who has turned your words into poetry comics. I appreciate the way the work allows daily observation to encompass everything from communing with one’s ancestors to grappling with rising COVID cases. What was the collaboration like?

Pai

Justin and I met through working together in an emerging arts professionals program through Tualatin Valley Creates. We stayed in touch after his program ended and when I was thinking about putting together a new collection using text and image, I reached out to Justin. Justin’s an incredible artist who’s been working in sequential art for many years. The back and forth between us has been very conversational and engaged. Much of the collection is about loneliness and isolation during pandemic, as we lived it and it unfolded. I had written these poems as an antidote to my own loneliness and desolation and having Justin work on illustrating these poems allowed us to revisit those inner landscapes and places while being deeply in community and friendship with one another. Working with Justin has been one of my favorite and deepest collaborations in putting a book together.

Borsuk

What do you think about the process of attention a multi-panel comic calls for and how that aligns (or perhaps changes) the experience of reading haiku (or reading your poems)?

Pai

Haiku poems are structured into three-line stanzas. The format of a four-panel comic allows for one panel per haiku line with a silent beat embedded somewhere within the total sequence. The slowing of attention created by splitting the poem out over three panels feels particularly effective with the spaciousness and silence to allow for the thought-feeling to emerge.

Borsuk

As I read the book, I thought about how visual poetry is really central to your work and I wondered—could you see yourself producing your own poetry comics at some point, or could you consider some of your existing work, like the Viewmaster slides, a kind of poetry comics?

Pai

I see the Viewmaster poem as a low-tech form of animation. I got into haiku/poetry comics through taking a class with Seattle graphic novelist David Lasky. I found throughout that process that although I could very roughly render a drawing and express my concepts, that was not a skill that I had cultivated in the long-term. The number of years and the hours of practice necessary to bring my skills up to speed in this area made it clear that I’d have to make certain choices about where I put my attention. I’d prefer to put my attention into audio projects and projects that engage with senses besides the visual because the visual world is always there. I want to give the eyes a rest so that the other senses can step forward – so that the poem experience can be more fully embodied.

Borsuk

Well, we started this conversation at nine o’clock at night and now it’s 11. It’s late, but I feel really invigorated, particularly by the idea of the embodied reading experience—one that engages the sensorium. This conversation has really touched me in a deep way. I so appreciate you making the time to do this tonight. Thank you, Shin Yu.

I’m very grateful, Amaranth. I feel like the affinities are strong and the respect for each other, and I really appreciate your thoughtfulness and the quality of your mind. Thank you so much.

Originally published in Moss: Volume Eight.