Henry Wei Leung is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of Paradise Hunger (2012), which won the Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Contest. He earned his MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan, and has been the recipient of Fulbright, Soros, and other fellowships. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, Drunken Boat, The Offing, and ZYZZYVA. He is currently working toward a PhD at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Leung’s poem, “Creed,” appeared in Issue Fifty-Seven of The Collagist.
Here, he speaks with interviewer Darby Price about snail mail, musical octaves, and how language is nothing and everything all at once.
As a reader, I’m drawn in by the emphasis on the speaker’s relationship to the written word, “this game // of symbols drawn from some desire’s shore,” and what I read as the conflation of that love with the speaker’s connection to others. Can you talk about the role of language throughout the poem—as concept, as bridge, as identity, and/or as a method of connecting and disconnecting?
Language is everything. I’m answering your questions out of order because this one will be the key to the rest (and suddenly I’m remembering a Cornelius Eady line: “that the key to any heaven is language”). I mean “everything” in a folded sense: language is actually nothing, it’s immaterial, it’s misprision, it’s decay, it’s the codification of a living thought into a textual object; it’s nothing because it’s not a thing—and yet it’s all we have. It’s the musical notation of our consciousness. So it becomes everything.
This poem is a long, final letter to all those I’ve exchanged snail mail with, and as much as I wanted it to be a poem about the promise of closeness and the intimacy of language, I think in the end that it’s really about the failure of closeness. To love is to reach for the Other, and there’s no meaningful way to do this except through language. Is it possible for the language of the Other to become so intimate that it lives in you, another’s voice running almost seamlessly through your voice? (A geek moment: I’m thinking of the ending to that beautiful but short-lived sci-fi show Dollhouse, in which someone is brought back to life by having his consciousness implanted into the body of the one he loves, alongside her consciousness. Is such a schizophrenia the real consummation of love?) But look at the poem. It’s part of my larger project of exploring the second-person address, to make the poem about “you” – both “you the reader” and something like a “lyric you” – and yet at the end it’s still all about “I.” You can achieve a seamlessness of voice, or something close, like a weave, but what you arrive at isn’t the Other; you only arrive back at yourself, at your own borders.
Throughout this poem, the speaker’s voice is interwoven with the voices of others, most of whom speak in direct quotes, sometimes parenthetically. What effect did you want to create with this back-and-forth structure?
Someone else asked me if I had “researched” the poem, i.e., did I dig up letters to find those lines and quotations? The poem was written feverishly, and all those quoted lines have been living in my consciousness for so long—whether as talismans against despair or as haunting shadows—that they were already at my fingertips as I wrote. That’s the point. That’s the closeness and the loneliness of writing letters, I think: you end up with these objects of paper which are always speaking at a volume corresponding to your own longing. But the speaking is an illusion; you’re actually hearing your own voice reading those words in your mind; you’re actually reading a page in silence.
When I read the poem, its movement is not on the formal level which switches between the speaker’s voice and the quoted voices; the effect is not mere clamor. The movement, rather, is in the wavering between affirmation and dissipation. You can’t affirm “I believe” without signaling uncertainty in the same instant. You can’t cite closeness without signaling loneliness. And I’m not describing opposites here; I’m describing edges. Think of the musical octave: if your tonic note is A, the farthest from it you can get is G#, which because of its distance is so tense and uncomfortable. But you just go one semitone further, and where do you end up? A on the next octave. (You can compare this to martial art degrees in the most traditional models: you start with a white belt and aspire to the black belt, but after that the subsequent stage of mastery is another white belt.) The poem is dealing with the Self-Other divide and the boundaries between people. But it’s not people standing on opposite ends of the room. They’re standing with their backs together: so close, and so far.
Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of your poem, “Creed”?
Meg Kearney’s poem of the same title (from An Unkindness of Ravens) was the first to truly move me. It was from that poem that I got my start as a poet. I still talk about it a lot, and I’ve written semi-critically about it, and I used to write a Creed every year, starting from 2003. Some of my friends, too. I have a collection on my computer of the ones they’ve sent me, these beautiful things that never get published (and are never sent out for publication as far as I know), these poem-shaped belief systems composed of the most profound and the most mundane words.
I stopped after this one because something had changed. I recognized that it had become a poem of its own, different and necessary in its own way, no longer hanging solely from the structure of Meg’s poem (but still very much in homage to it). It was also a kind of goodbye poem, a goodbye to all those years and all those letters, the desperate earnestness of it all. I don’t fully understand what happened yet. But I haven’t written letters since the poem, either.
What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?
Carolyn Forche’s anthology, Against Forgetting. I’m teaching excerpts from it for the first two weeks of my Poetry & Activism class. Diary of Use by J. Vera Lee came across my desk recently, and the poems in it are just marvelous. And I’m always reading—always, constantly, perpetually, for my sanity—Simone Weil and Rumi.
What writing projects are you currently working on?
I just came back from a year in Hong Kong on a Fulbright. I was overly concerned with the Umbrella protests that broke out just after I arrived last fall, and I was finishing a manuscript of poems while out there on the streets. The manuscript ended up being a book about Hong Kong, which I’m shopping around now. I’m not convinced anyone cares. I’m actually trying to leave that fall behind me and stop writing about it, in spite of myself. I’m trying to find my way back into fiction, to finish a novel of the martial arts, which I’ve been sitting on for too long. And I keep thinking I might write some kind of neurotic Christopher Smart poem. When my partner and I leave for the day, our cat sits by the door to wait; but I’m convinced that space and time are the same thing for her. So what does this mean in the passage of daylight, and how does she decide when to stop waiting? Ha!