신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. She is the editor of What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories on Food and Family (2021) and of A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, author of poetry collections The Wet Hex (winner of the Midland Authors Society Award for Poetry and finalist for a Minnesota Book Award) Unbearable Splendor (finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry, winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry); Rough, and Savage; and Skirt Full of Black (winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry), co-editor of Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption, and author of bilingual illustrated book for children Cooper’s Lesson and picture book Where We Come From, co-written with Diane Wilson, Shannon Gibney, and John Coy. Her forthcoming picture book, Revolutions are Made of Love: Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs, co-written with Mélina Mangal, will be published in 2025.
She is a teaching artist with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and elsewhere. She is a former MacDowell fellow and has received grants from the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. She lives in Minneapolis where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang.
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Interview with SUNYUNG SHIN:
In an interview you did about five years ago with The CW Twin Cities, you said that your community work aligned well with your mission as a poet. What to you is your mission as a poet? And how, if at all, has this mission changed over the past five years?
To borrow from the great Dionne Brand, I want to say that my mission as a poet is to be against tyranny. That sounds very grandiose on its own, but I do think that covers a lot! Within that mission is still the possibility of touching everything that we think of as good, as connective, as caring. I don’t think that mission has changed over the past five years. I also like what June Jordan says about her job as a poet, which (paraphrasing) is to be accountable to the people who know she works with words, and poetry is a political act because it is about telling the truth. I mean, I would hope all artists and writers are trying to tell the truth.
What, for you, is the relationship between poetry and healing?
I think poetry creates and opens a hospitable place for the individual and collective self to allow healing to happen. It seems that a person needs deep rest and spaces of stillness to heal. I think poetry, or any encounter with art, can offer that. The person can hope to connect to things in themselves that are wounds, without judgment. Wounds want to be seen and acknowledged. Then they have served their purpose and they can potentially transform in what we think of as repair, healing, wholeness.
What do you think is your most potent form of magic? When did you accept this?
I’m not sure but identifying specifically as not just a feminist but a “feminist killjoy,” after Sara Ahmed’s work, feels very freeing! Otherwise, perhaps becoming a mother, a parent, was my biggest leap in terms of accessing something that felt like magic. That was when I was 22.
What is one valuable lesson you learned or were reminded of recently? What, if anything, did this lesson compel you to release?
Witnessing Palestinian resistance and the resistance of non-Palestinian anti-Zionists has been a valuable lesson, if I could call it that. I feel I don’t have the merit to approach writing about it. There are not words strong enough to condemn this genocide, this massacre. If there is a lesson for me, or something to be released, it is perhaps a reminder to release any cynicism that does not serve the greater good because cynicism or hopelessness is a betrayal of whatever humanity the rest of us may be able to salvage, and turn into resistance.
In what ways is your poetry writing a form of time travel? What, if anything, is the relationship between time travel and resisting/dismantling state violence?
As long as a poem has been passed along by humans, encountering it in another moment is time travel, it allows us to touch into transcendence, right? It brings the fabric of your moment back into touch with the fabric of the moment it was written. And the magic of words in particular is that they are human inventions, they are spells, and individual words change with usage over time. The appear because we need them to communicate something, to name something, and they morph as our needs and context morph. I love it so much. They are histories in and of themselves. I think about English words that come from agriculture and raising animals, such as “brood,” which has come to mean something in the human consciousness and cognition, to think about something for a long time but not perhaps make many changes of thought, but typically my students who have no experience of farms or nesting birds don’t know that it is the word for when birds sit on an egg to keep it warm until the baby is ready to emerge as a new life.
The aspect of writing as time travel as resistance/dismantling…it must have to do with our collective memory, right? It does seem to be the most precise and detailed and most importantly durable and portable and replicable way to pass information from person to person and generation to generation. It’s not more important than visual art or music or anything else, but each form and genre has its strengths. Writing’s strength is the ability to pass on massive amounts of information (and emotion is information) from one person to potentially billions, and with digital networks, basically in real time. And before the digital revolution, mass printing is responsible for the fastest spread of very radical ideas about human equality, democratic governance, and other ideas that have been deadly to monarchies and other forms of autocracy and tyranny.
Poet in particular are easy targets throughout history. We are often unsponsored, we do not intrinsically require formal, extensive, or expensive education through institutions. All we need is language and a moral imagination, an ability to observe and to feel deeply and to use word in rhetorically effective ways to move ourselves and our people(s). We can make images, we can communicate complex and paradoxical ideas in a very small amount of space, with just a few words. We are easy targets, we may only have protection from other unprotected people, but also that is the majority of humanity. And history has taught us that because we are mortal, not even kings and queens and tyrants are invulnerable. The unadorned, unmedicated human is exactly the same. Our equal vulnerability is our equality.
Poems can be so dangerous, just as slogans can be. Poems containing dangerous ideas, which can be an image of freedom, or an expression of an emotion that those in power have outlawed, such as the idea that gender doesn’t exist, or that whiteness is a vicious scam, can be brief, made up of few words—unlike a novel or even a newspaper article, which may have important information, but no art, no music, no magic, no passion, no irrationality, no dream logic.
In a novel, a thorough human censor has to read the whole work to accurately find all the objectionable parts. Not that this necessarily stops censors from censoring works that they suspect are problematic to their regime based on the person or publisher or language, etc. But it’s a barrier, if they are able to held accountable in any way by the people or by other powerful entities in that society.
Poets don’t need publishers. We don’t need to be literate. We don’t need an alphabet. Just as musicians don’t. A singer doesn’t even need an instrument other than the body. A singer doesn’t even need words. Just sounds. And poetry, while words are more reductive than sounds, can sometimes come close to that purity of feeling that a vocalist can evoke in the listener, or, I would assume, the Deaf person who can feel vibrations in the floor, or if they put their fingers to a singers throat. Our bodies, our skull bones, our tissues create the sonic chamber. The air itself allows sound waves to travel to the body of the Other. We are connected by the air, as oceanic creatures are all touching essentially the same water. A message dropped at one end of the ocean may be carried by current to many places. Even our best scientists (even AI…) cannot exactly predict the weather far in advance because there are too many variables on the planet. Even the most sage poet cannot predict what the effect of their words will be on another person, their best friend, or someone on the other side of the world, or someone thousands of years into the future. Is part of the message distorted or lost in transmission, of course, but to me (and of course not just me, nothing I’m saying here or anywhere is original!) that is part of the beauty of being human, our mortality, the evanescence of our existence, but also the continuity. None of us could exist without the millions of ancestors before us, going back to the first forms of life on earth. It’s unbearably romantic!
All literature and art can be coded and disguised, and always has been by those working to communicate as much as possible while still avoiding censorship. Queer artists, or artists who might identify as queer today, offer the master class in this. Poems because of their potential brevity can be highly portable, replicable, and memorizable. Language is abstract to begin with, and because of metaphor, it can be highly allusive, and does not have to name the thing (e.g. same-gender love) in a literal manner in order for the writer to communicate. Should outlawed people have to do this, of course not, these laws and mores are always immoral and oppressive, but such is the nature of the power and response, right? Art is always political. Language is always political.
Because of the compression of figurative language, poems can record, suggest, or symbolize ideas, counter arguments, and acts of resistance in a few words or lines. Because of their brevity, and if employing sonic devices such as rhyme, rhythm, and other forms of repetition, they can be more easily memorized and disseminated by many people as quickly as the words can be written or said and offered to another person.
Poems can also exist in utter privacy, and that, too is political.
Of course if two people know the same code or system, they don’t need written symbols or sound, such as someone communicating with DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark who, in his own words, is an “essayist, historian, translator, and an actor in the most thrilling development in DeafBlind history, the Protactile movement.” Because we both live in Minnesota, I have had the privilege of briefly meeting Clark at a literary awards ceremony. I have so far had the pleasure of reading two of his books, Where I Stand: On the Signing Community and My DeafBlind Experience, and How to Communicate: Poems. For those interested in the ProTactile movement, in addition to Clark’s work, this company and its website look like a credible insider source Tactile Communications, LLC.
What, if anything, is your relationship to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work?
Her work has given me, along with many others, further permission to explore and models of embodying multilingualism as well as interdisciplinary work with image and text. I have been interested in Greek mythology since childhood, as well as French language through ballet and school language classes, and female revolutionaries such as Joan of Arc and Yu Guan Soon. I was drawn to collage work and remixing before learning about her work, and when I was brought to Dictée and her life by my early mentor Mark Nowak, it was revelatory. I’d spent my whole life feeling Other in what seemed like idiosyncratic and somewhat nonsensical obsessions, but I began reading her at a wonderful time, in my 20s. I feel very lucky. And of course like probably every Korean American woman who admires her work, deeply broken at how her life was so violently and senselessly cut short. The darkness and grief is haunting, even as and perhaps because it is so disgustingly and malevolently common in the world of girls and women globally. But I also know that to overemphasize that terrible end to her life is a profound disservice to the totality of her life and of her artistic vision and practice that did not have the opportunity to develop and evolve their artwork over decades into older age, as it has for several celebrated white women artists (e.g. Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Bourgeois, Helen Frankenthaler, Marina Abramovic, etc.). In the context of the books by several Asian North American poets, my mentor Mark Nowak introduced me to the term ethno-autobiography, which has been a framework for my work since, and can also, I think, be a generative descriptor for Cha’s work. The publisher’s description of Dictée reads, “A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha’s mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.”
When you write poetry intentionally with a fixed form, such as in Abecedarian: On Purchasing and Receiving Genetic Information from Two Commercial DNA Companies, do you turn to structure as a tool to move differently through the process, is it a comfort, a deliberate limitation?
Definitely! For me it’s a way of asking myself and the reader to test a possible connection. Does it make sense to use the Roman alphabet as a way to explore colonialism, DNA, lineage, descent? I love how form brings so much meaning to the field between you, the reader, language, and ideas even before you bring your own language to it. It also feels like a way of being in conversation with writers and readers of the past, which to me is also a way of taking off the pressure to be “original” or singular in some way that I think doesn’t serve the rapacious human ego—or just to speak for myself, my ego—or the experience of being in the world of a poem, which to me should be an opportunity for a kind of communion, hospitality, invitation, humility, re-examination of received ideas. That doesn’t mean the poem can’t have swagger or boldness, brashness, or confrontation. We often need that, too. I don’t think that performance is at odds with humility. Or, I hope it’s not. We are all humbled at the altar of life, the universe. So much is out of our control. The poem is a place where we can try to wrest a little control, just for a moment, until it snaps back into the cosmos by force of gravity? Mortality? Even the stars go supernova and die. Then having to check that statement to make sure I wasn’t lying…Google Search Labs | AI Overview says, “Stars die when they run out of fuel to fuse elements together, and how they die depends on their mass:
When a star like the Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel, it expands into a red giant, which can be up to 100 times its original diameter. The star then sheds its outer layers and shrinks into a white dwarf. The white dwarf is a very dense, Earth-sized core that cools and gradually becomes invisible over billions of years.
When a massive star runs out of fuel, it swells into a red supergiant and then explodes in a supernova. The supernova is a huge explosion that can outshine the star’s galaxy for a week or more. The debris from the supernova scatters elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron into space, which can eventually form new stars and planets.”
Who are two artists (of any genre) whose work you recommend?
I love this question, thank you! Definitely Jinny Yu, a Korean Canadian artist who I had the great privilege of collaborating with on a standalone art book BARIDEGI, curated by Vancouver-based Godfre Leung and published by ArtSpeak, which we later ported into a central series in The Wet Hex. I felt a deep affinity with her work as soon as I saw it. Her rectangles and circles and doors and portals are motifs that I’ve been interested in since I was a child and learned about perspective and parallelograms and how to draw three-dimensional objects. Her work is about migration and diaspora and guesthood and im/possibility of repair and so much more.
I would also like to recommend poet, editor, and curator Heid E. Erdrich, who is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Minneapolis. Her poems always surprise me from line to line, and image to image, which I place a high value on, and she is an intellectual poet, and works with a broad range of ideas, and doesn’t seem to place any limits on her intellect, which I admire. She is also an incredible literary citizen, works incredibly hard to build community and spaces for other writers, in particular Native and indigenous poets and writers, but in fact everyone. She is a model for me of a poet who works in public spaces and yet also seems to protect a private, idiosyncratic vision that is very free. Her work also avoids didacticism—it always feel fresh, strange, and relevant to whole range of being human. I think she’s a genius. She is also personally very funny, kind, generous, and honest. She doesn’t play games and doesn’t curry favor and doesn’t suck up to anyone. She’s real. She holds complexity. I think she understands what love is and what we’re here to do—protect and advocate for the vulnerable (which is sometimes ourselves), and embody respect for our living interdependence on earth without being self righteous or pompous or shaming about it. I aspire.
Experience more of SunYung’s work here.