Jan-Henry Gray is a Filipino-American poet. His debut collection, Documents, was chosen by D. A. Powell as the winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. It was also chosen by writer and Yale-NUS lecturer Lawrence Ypil for our introductory class on writing poetry, where we discussed it at loving length.
Earlier this October, we reached out to Gray, who kindly agreed to a remote interview with us from the pandemic-stricken wastelands of Brooklyn. Through the fuzzy depths of a Zoom call, Gray shares with us some thoughts on writing about place and the past, as well as the craft of writing itself.
SEAN:
You’ve mentioned before to Rebellious Magazine that you might have gotten published because you share a certain affinity with D. A. Powell, both as West Coast poets and as queer poets. I think we’re interested in that first part, being non-Americans. What does the West Coast bring to poetry in terms of place? What’s a West Coast poem to you?
JAN-HENRY:
I can’t speak for the West Coast or the U.S., but let me explain what I meant by that. It hinges on the idea of legibility—how you read, and what kind of access any reader has to the text. People are bilingual, people have ways of understanding or reading, and certain texts are more legible depending on who you are.
And for me, the question of legibility is: will the person reading see the poem? Will it be legible to them? For example, there’s that poem titled “d. 1997” about meeting Allen Ginsberg in a bookstore. Now that poem is about a specific bookstore in San Francisco. It’s also about a cruising spot in Land’s End. Of course, you don’t have to know the geography of San Francisco to walk into the poem, but I think it helps. Depending on who the reader is, depending on what sort of cultural references are legible to them, I think all that helps.
SEAN:
Is the placing of the poem then a one-to-one legibility between people who have lived through that place, and the place itself?
JAN-HENRY:
No, because poetry’s weird. Legibilities are kind of like entry-points. Ways in which a reader engages with a poet. And sometimes a reader will say, “I don’t get it.” Or you have some sort of struggle, some sort of barrier that’s keeping you from seeing the work, or understanding it—even though understanding is also another loaded word. So it’s not a one-to-one legibility, but I think that there are possible entry-points.
A simpler answer would be: When I write about the West Coast, I’m also talking about living close to the Pacific Ocean. The Philippines are a number of islands that are in the Pacific Ocean, and California is on the Pacific Ocean. And the ocean figures very prominently in the book.
I think there’s something about migration across waters that’s really important to me geographically. Maybe in terms of landscape, this is a simpler question to the West Coast. I grew up near the water, and that’s really important to me. I don’t know if I can live somewhere landlocked.
SEAN:
Right. The ocean’s very present in your work, especially the Pacific. You crossed it once, to get to the U.S., but you haven’t gone back. How do you negotiate this distance, this gap, when writing about the Philippines?
JAN-HENRY:
It’s impossible. That’s my best answer for that. I have never returned to the Philippines, and I can’t. I didn’t have an American passport yet. So I’m not allowed to. And so I left the Philippines when I was six years old—I’m forty-two, now—and any attempt to write about it is written through various layers. There’s time, there’s the huge, huge gap of memory—no one remembers anything before six years old. It’s as ephemeral as it gets.
So where I spent most of my time negotiating that was through the maid poems, because I don’t remember them [the maids] that well. I can’t—I left when I was six. So writing through them, or with them, meant imagining. It was a lot of imaginative and poetic work.
So the question of how to negotiate was a really tricky one. An ethical concern of mine that no one brought up, except myself, was: do I get to write about them? Do I get to write about the maids? Meaning, who am I to write about them? Who am I to write about these women?
I think maybe this helps answer the question—this is me being transparent—the last two poems I wrote before the book was done for me, were “Maid Poem #3” and “Maid Poem #4”. So I started imagining this woman, the woman of the house, which I guess would have been my grandmother, the matriarch of the family, organising this party, and thinking, “I bet she really doesn’t know who they are.” And “Maid Poem #3” is the woman asking these questions, and it’s only her speaking. The maid never speaks. And I kept thinking, well, the only way to negotiate this distance from the Philippines, and some of these ethical questions, these ethical distances, is to just show that distance. And I think that the poem is about how this woman doesn’t really understand who they are. And maybe I don’t either. Maybe I’m that woman who doesn’t really understand the maids.
DANIELA:
I’m actually writing some stuff about maids, and these ethical concerns really do come up. I’ve had maids back home, and some of them were literally children, they were 14 or 15, and I was 7. How do you bring these moments into academic space, and not be like, “I’m gonna over-analyse you”? How do we perforate the genuine experience, the pureness of something, or the truth of something? Coming at it with a poem, how do you not corrupt that?
JAN-HENRY:
Here are a few steps that might help: to not think of it as ‘corrupting’ a purity. It might get in the way. If you are researching this culturally, anthropologically, you can do that research without thinking of it as there being ‘a pure’ and being ‘a corrupt’. That sort of binary might get in the way of your thinking. Sean’s question earlier was about taking up that middle space of the ocean. There’s a lot in that middle space, you know. I wrote a poem in which—I think—they poison the father. So I’m not necessarily thinking of the maid as these pure angels whom we should feel bad for. They are also seeking revenge. And that’s in the middle space, I think.
SEAN:
Looking back at Documents, food shows up a lot—not just in its preparation, but in consumption and the rituals around it. As a former chef, do you think there’s a sense of craft that permeates both the kitchen and the writing desk?
JAN-HENRY:
YES. Yes yes yes. I cooked professionally for 12 years, longer than I’ve been writing. I didn’t go to school for cooking. I do it because I love it. It’s just a part of me. So in terms of craft, I think I actually try to steal as many strategies from the kitchen as I can when writing. In the kitchen, working carefully and quickly was very important. When you’re finished cooking a dish, you know when you are done. With poetry, it’s harder to say. You can always change it and revise. With food, the dish has to leave the kitchen. There is no infinite revision.
But there is something about cooking that reminds me every time that it’s about pleasure. Food has to taste good. So with a poem, I try to make sure that it has flavour. I revise my poems by reading them. If I can’t read it out loud then that shouldn’t be my poem. So there are certain sensory things from my relationship with food that I take into my relationship with writing. I mean I am like a tourist, the natural world is important to me. I’m sure you’ve heard in your classes to ground your work in details, in vivid descriptions. I remember in grad school someone wrote “the sweet smell of cilantro” and my reaction was: that’s not the right word! But how do you ground yourself in the description if you don’t know? How do you describe a flower if you’ve never seen it? It’s the connection to the natural world. You have to experience it on your hands, in your mouth, your ears, etc.
BELINDA:
Thank you so much! To wrap this section up, we are supposed to come from the perspective of a beginning poetry student. In our own writing process, sometimes we feel a bit of frustration, sometimes a bit of confusion, sometime pure joy, sometimes a distance to ourselves. From your experience, is there any specific advice you would like to give to us as we embark on this journey?
JAN-HENRY:
I think the position of being and feeling like a beginner is so valuable. I remember someone once said that poetry is like groping in the dark, looking for a light switch. It’s not about finding the light switch, it’s not about turning the lights on, it’s about groping in the dark. And I don’t know, is that pleasurable? Is that scary? Is that bizarre? Yes, yes, yes. So I guess it would be helpful to remember something I tell my students all the time: what you are doing isn’t practice. You’re not practising writing a poem. Your poem is now, you are writing a poem. If you are writing a poem, you are writing a poem. If you’re writing a poem you’re a poet. So you’re a poet, and that’s that. There are various established poets that will say, “I don’t really know what I’m doing.” So either they’re all lying, or they’re being honest. In other words, don’t necessarily think of what you are doing as “not a poem yet,” or “not a poet yet.”
If you have to satisfy one person, and if it’s not yourself, then who cares? I was trying to write poems that I would like, poems that would be legible to me. At least me.
DANIELA:
Thank you so much! Do you have any questions for us?
JAN-HENRY:
What kind of discoveries have you made this semester about poetry that have been exciting to you?
DANIELA:
When we were discussing Documents in class, I remember Larry saying: “Do you guys see how much our consciousness had to travel with the book, with the poet, with the voice, to get to a point in which this poem makes sense?” And we were all arriving at that place consciously. We’re so deep in a thought, all of us together, and that really scared me. Because I realised we’re all one!
JAN-HENRY:
Yeah, it’s scary but kind of beautiful.
SEAN:
For me, it was the idea of surrender. The idea of just trusting where things are coming from, and letting that speak for itself. The idea is incredibly sexy to me.
JAN-HENRY:
No, it should be. Surrender is being vulnerable in front of a public, right? Whether that public is just one other reader.
BELINDA:
For me, writing poetry is taking me closer to parts of my subconscious or even unconscious mind. Sometimes I’m really shocked at some of the things I write. I don’t think about any subject matter, I just let it flow, and then afterwards I look at it and I’m like, “What did I just create?” So it’s a very daunting process but I feel like this is something I have been preventing myself from doing for so long.
JAN-HENRY:
Yeah, I think what you’re talking about is the word permission. Giving yourself permission to say anything. Surrender is a kind of permission. When faced with a blank page, you can write anything down. You can cross it out, you can delete it—but you can write anything down. It’s kind of wild.
About the authors:
Belinda Cheng (she/her) is a passionate traveller without any foundational cultural identity. She loves to spend time with the ocean, trees, and animals. Somedays, she is a peer counsellor ready to offer unconditional support. Somedays, she is a child running through all the puddles.
Daniela Salazar (she/her) is a multimedia artist who specialises in sound design and bel canto. She is open to all artistic mediums and has recently discovered poetry. Her writing is strongly influenced by her experience growing up in El Salvador in a matriarchal family.
Sean Chua (he/him) writes poetry and prose. The entirety of his writing since 2014 has been managed by a swarm of very small brain-eating amoebas. Because they are very small, they can only write short things. Sean’s preferred genres are magical realism, science fiction, and tap water.
Yale-NUS College Introduction to Poetry 2020 