Poet Visits Campus, Connects with Students

By Emily Blackner
Elm Staff Writer

“Remember to floss.” That was the unusual advice of poet Ken Chen when he visited Washington College on Oct. 28.

Chen is the winner of the 2009 Yale Younger Poet’s prize, America’s oldest annual literary award. His collection, “Juvenilia,” deals with common themes like family and break-ups, but in a very unique way.
“Imagine two arrows crossing. On one side is content, it’s very meaningful,” Chen said. “The other side is where you can do weird things with language.” He also compares poetry to music videos. “A poem is combining different things together, things that are interesting.”

“My two favorite poems are ‘Yes, No, Yes, The Future, Gone, Happy, Yes, No, Yes, Cut, You’ and the first one in the book, ‘My Father and My Mother Decide My Future And How Could We Forget Wei Wang?’” he said. “They both might be relevant to students because one is about breakups and the other is about what to do with the rest of your life.”

Chen got involved in poetry in college. “I chose poetry because I wanted to take a creative writing class, and the fiction class required thirty pages of writing to get in, and the poetry class only needed five,” he said.

College also influenced the style of some his poems. “My poems come from being a lawyer; they’re very analytical,” he said, and often make use of logic and rhetoric like the kind on the LSAT tests.
“A lot of them have very unusual shapes or are really long,” Chen said, which sometimes makes it difficult to do readings. For the Lit house reading, he employed a projector to allow the audience to see the shapes of some of the poems as he read them.

“I start with the break-up poems,” Chen said. “I think people have a limited degree of empathy so they understand those a lot better than they understand other cultures.”

Understanding, especially of themselves, is important for poets. “It’s important to notice yourself when you’re reading books, watching movies, or enjoying culture,” Chen said. “See what makes you enjoy it and makes it feel good to you, and work with those things.”

“Obvious things like, ‘read and write every day’” are also part of Chen’s advice. “Budget your time wisely so you can spend more time doing those things,” he said.

Even for those who do not aspire to be poets, reading is important. “We’re living in a time where a lot of the cultural infrastructure is falling apart, like universities. So it’s really important to read books,” Chen said.

Chen loves other aspects of his visits to colleges besides giving advice to students; “Free bagels,” he said.

In the future, Chen plans to try his hand at fiction writing. “I’ve been working on a novel for the past ten or twelve years. It’s about why you shouldn’t be with the one you love, especially if both of you have magical powers.”

Chen’s training as a lawyer has impacted his reading of his poetry as well as his writing them. “I find it very easy to do a presentation,” he said. “It’s very important to make sure I feel nervous, feel like I’m in my body or it’s really easy to just go to autopilot. I have to remind myself that I’m in this place and time.”

Chen also has experience planning poetry readings for others as part of his position as executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. “With the right type of curatorial vision, someone can become a situation artist,” he said. “You think, ‘how can I make it interesting?’ I like to challenge the idea that events are disconnected from the world. I recently curated an event with a panel about why people are nerds.”

The Asian American Writers’ Workshop has an online component called Kickstarter that Chen recommends to students. “You can invest in art projects on the Internet. There are lots of prizes like getting a manuscript reviewed by a William Morris agent or a tour of MTV music video shoot,” he said. More information can be found by going to aaww.org/kickstarter.

Projects like the Kickstarter are increasingly necessary. “There’s no funding for literature in general,” Chen said. “It’s not considered art. It’s so hard to get money, so the federal government should give money and increase literary funding.”

Chen feels that literature is important enough to warrant federal funding. “There are things we get irrespective of the content, like learning how to focus. People don’t realize it but reading and writing are where we go to become individuals. There’s a one-on-one relationship with other minds that’s very weird and intimate that doesn’t happen a lot.”

There are other ways to increase enthusiasm for literature. “It’s really easy to create a literary scene among you and your friends,” Chen said. “You, on an individual level, could do reading groups, reading series, share work. This just comes from people being friends with each other and creating dynamics.”
“Or, small presses could sew five-dollar bills into poetry books,” he said.

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