Windmill Spring 2018

Wong teaches at Western Washington University in Washington, living outside of Seattle, and despite the time difference and our conflicting schedules, I was able to have the absolute joy of talking to her about poetry over the phone. What I find most interesting about conversations from poet to poet are the discussions on craft. What makes a poem? How does each poet come to a poem? What struggles are easier than others? I found Jane and I speaking mostly about craft. “Craft is just the tool one needs to engage in curiosity,” she says. Wong’s first collection, Overpour, a stunning collage of ghosts, history, language, and voices, came out two years ago. When I read Overpour, I found each poem to be a new layer. Yet, when I reached the end of the collection, it didn’t feel like a finished piece; it is better than that. It is something that I can peel and re-glue over and over again. And each time I do, I see something different.

Some of my favorite pieces from the collection are in the voice of her mother, which Wong describes as being very transtemporal. Wong has worked specifically on the poetics of haunting in the past, which is the focus of her dissertation, “Going Towards the Ghost: The Poetics of Haunting in Contemporary Asian American Poetry.” She describes this aspect of “going towards the ghost” as being “transpecific and transtemporal,” and constantly moving, which is what happens when she takes on her mother’s persona. In one of my favorite poems, “Forty-Three,” she writes in the “I” of her mother: I open the refrigerator and scoop out the cheeks of a fish. I call the fish my husband. I call Jane in Hong Kong but she doesn’t answer.

What I admire about this piece so much is her willingness to distance herself from her own being and dive straight into the voice of another person, especially someone so immediate to her. Currently, as she works on her second 106 Herzing