Longing (Emerging Writer’s Contest Winner: POETRY)

In poetry, our winner is Andy Chen, for his piece “Longing.”

This year’s poetry judge was Porsha Olayiwola. Of the poem, she writes:

“‘Longing’ manages to instill within its reader the same essence that the poem itself is after. That is, we read this poem overwhelmed in a sense of longing. The ellipses, ending or starting every line, offer a continuation and anticipation, which mirrors the content. Because of this, the poem is boundless, the writer offers us an infinite number of possibilities in our reading and understanding of want, longing and loss.

This, of course, doesn’t even begin to chip away at the understanding of the conflict and tension of the poem: the speaker, their object of affection, the desperate mother, the thieving war. This poem teaches us that longing is a vast, and sometimes senseless, vacuum. We learn that emptiness is not empty. It is heavy and complete. By way of its form and language, ‘Longing’ teaches us that a poem, too, can be a vacuum of sorts, a never-ending cascade of want.”

What inspired “Longing”?

I started writing this poem right after learning about the kundiman, a traditional Filipino love song. These songs were ostensibly love songs for a beloved person but were also patriotic, anti-colonial love songs about the Philippines during Spanish colonization. The word kundiman comes from the Tagalog phrase “kung hindi man,” which translates to “if it were not so,” and I was very moved (and still am) by the kind of longing suggested by those words—longing for something that is not so, and perhaps even cannot be so. To me, it’s a longing for something that requires a different world to exist, and in the anti-colonial context, true liberation indeed requires a different kind of world to come into being. There’s a powerful hope in that longing.

That type of thought—“if X were not so, then Y could be”—is essentially the syntax that my poem takes, though of course connecting the two halves of that sentence is never done and instead is left open to the reader. In considering the Filipino love song, I wondered, does the longing have to be for one or the other—either for a beloved person or for country? In the kundiman, those two coexist in how one masquerades as the other, and that inspired me to go a step further and wonder how I could write a poem where even more possibilities could coexist.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing this piece?

Longing is an obsession of mine. I love music and movies about longing. The same is true for art, books, and of course, poems. I think about it all the time, and perhaps more importantly, I feel it a lot, and writing is how I try to make sense of those feelings. In this piece specifically, I used a form that offered a very different container for those feelings than the forms I’d used before, and that container allowed multiple possibilities to coexist at once in a way that felt exciting to me. It also gave space for a lack of certainty and closure that feels true to the experience of longing.

In writing the lines themselves, I tried to create as many connections as possible between the left and right columns, and I tried to avoid any clearly “right” answers. At the same time, I tried to create an experience where, depending on the person, some connections will feel stronger than others—some may even feel correct—but rather than any connection being objectively right or wrong, I think the connections that resonate most with any given reader reveal something about their unique experience of longing and what longing means to them. I certainly hope that happens, anyway, and I know the process of writing the poem did that for me.

Who are you reading right now, and who informs your work?

I feel very lucky in that a few poets I love have recently come out with new books—Danez Smith, Jennifer Chang, and Carl Phillips. Those three, along with Madeleine Cravens’s first book, are the books of poetry I’ve been reading and rereading lately. Each has pushed my sense of what poems can do, and I love it when that happens. That said, for me, it’s not just poetry that can do that, so I’m always reading in many other genres too: I love fiction, I love memoir, I love mysteries, and I find what makes a successful mystery isn’t so different from what makes a successful poem. Also, I teach middle school and high school English, so a lot of what I read is informed by that: not just books I’m teaching or considering teaching, but also books my students recommend to me. I love young adult books, and the alchemy that makes a great YA book impossible to put down is something I admire and want to tap into for my poems.

Lastly, I’m writing this in October, so I’m on a bit of a New England witch kick. I recently read The Witch of Blackbird Pond, by Elizabeth George Speare, and We Ride Upon Sticks, by Quan Barry. I especially adored the latter. There are some turns of phrase Quan Barry uses that are seared into my brain—the book is deeply moving at times and hilariously silly at others—and she reminded me that using language inventively, memorably, and poetically can happen in so many ways and to so many ends.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

As my poems have improved, I don’t think that improvement is the result of becoming smarter or having more meaningful experiences to put on the page; instead, I simply think that the language at my disposal is more expansive. I love reading across different genres and time periods because I encounter language being used in ways I wouldn’t have thought of before. Expanding my sense of language is exciting, and it makes more exciting things happen on the page. This also happens when I listen to music while I write (which I usually do): sometimes a lyric contains some surprising use of words that will inspire and challenge me. My advice to writers is to try to expand your sense of language in whatever way excites you (which is different for everyone) and to try to tap into anything that uses language in a way that feels new and inventive to you.

Something I’ve struggled with is making time for writing. My job (like many people’s jobs) is very demanding on both my time and my emotional energy, and on many days, summoning the drive to write is difficult. An artist friend once gave me the advice that doing something is better than doing nothing, and I’ve tried to put that into practice: even if I’m so tired that I just want to collapse into my bed, I try to spend just thirty seconds scribbling down a line or an image. It’s barely more than nothing—but it’s not nothing. And I’ve often found myself returning to lines I’ve written in moments like this, only to discover a nice phrase that pushes a poem I’m stuck on in a new direction (in fact, this happened with one of the lines in “Longing”). Even if that happens only once in every twenty, or thirty, or one hundred such scribblings, it’s worth it. But even if I don’t go back, it’s nice in the moment to feel like I’m flexing my writing muscles a tiny bit.

What projects are you working on now? Where is your writing headed?

I recently finished a draft of my first manuscript of poems, so I’m sitting with that—revising, playing with order, and considering its arc. The manuscript is about being Asian and being American and the many times when those feel in tension or even incompatible. It spends a lot of time exploring the myths of those two cultures and trying to find space for myself in each—for example, in fairy tales or values like individualism and the American dream, and, on the other hand, in Confucian parables and the superstitions my parents received from their parents growing up in Taiwan. The manuscript is also very much about longing—for self-understanding, for belonging, for feeling worthy of love.

*

1. If not for the lushness of southern magnolias …	a. … you could dream of flight.
2. If not for the time you nearly drowned on your first canoe ride …	b. … I could learn to fold a frog.
3. If not for the evolution of opposable thumbs …	c. … the sun could rise unnoticed.
4. If not for the war …	d. … no one would have called it the new world.
5. If not for form and language …	e. … a balloon could swell, limitless.
6. If not for breathing on the mirror to draw …	f. … the memory could mean the same to both of us.
7. If not for the need to believe …	g. … the poem could be written.
8. If not for the empty lighthouse …	h. … loss could be blinked away.
9. If not for your mother selling the book from under your pillow …	i. … we could be together.
10. If not for the picture frame where a window should be …	j. … swimming in calm water could be like disappearing.