ALL Review: How did you get your start writing poetry? What’s your origin story?
Megan Kim: I’ve always liked to read. From the time I was really, really little, I’ve always liked how words sounded. The first thing I wanted to do was be a children’s book author. I guess if you’re a child, you’re like ‘I’m going to write for children!’ Then I wanted to be a novelist. When I got to high school, that’s when I got super serious about poetry. My poetry was awful, but I got really excited about reading contemporary poets. There’s this national school program called Poetry Out Loud. It’s a recitation contest, so you’re not writing original poems for it, but they have a really good database of a lot of contemporary poems that I don’t think I would have been exposed to otherwise. So I participated in that, and that’s when I really started reading poetry as a teenager. I was dead set on getting my MFA from that point onward.
AR: What were your early influences? What’s influencing you lately?
MK: Early on when I started reading more contemporary poetry, I was really affected by Louise Glück. It’s funny because I sound nothing like Louise Glück, and I don’t want to write like Louise Glück, but as a sixteen-year-old, I read her and thought ‘This is like the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me!’. And then I will never forget the year that Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds came out. I believe it was 2016. I was about 16 or 17, and I just couldn’t stop reading it, couldn’t stop talking about it. That was really formative for me. And then in college, I had the opportunity to do cataloging work in what was basically a library filled with work by writers that were either from, or preceding, or in the lineage of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago. I think, not so much the way I write, but the way I think about poetry was really affected by that experience and those artists. Right now, I have this ongoing interest in poetry by Asian American writers broadly. That started with a general thought of ‘Oh, I want to read things by people who look like me,’ and it turned into more of ‘I want to study what this is, what this could be, its evolution, its patterns, its lineages.’ I read a lot of that, and I’m really influenced by it. If I went into more academic work in terms of studying literature, that would be my area. In particular, I really admire the work of Suji Kwock Kim, Jenny Xie, and Sally Wen Mao. I keep coming back to those poets.
AR: Your writing seems very focused on place—Chicago, California, etc. Your bio specifically mentions the Siskiyou Mountains. How do you feel that your physical location shapes or has shaped you, creatively or in general?
MK: I write a lot of one-off poems. I don’t write thinking ‘Oh, this is my set of poems on place,’ or whatever. But I started noticing a couple of years ago that a lot of my poems really focus on place, on being located somewhere or not being located. I spent some time thinking about why that is, and I think that it has to do with this wider preoccupation I have with distance and with migration. I have one parent who’s a Korean immigrant and another parent who grew up everywhere as a result of a military childhood, so I’m really interested in our relationship to where we are, especially in a time when I feel like it’s easier for a lot of people to not think about that. I’m thinking about the landscape of capitalism and the way so many suburbs in America look the same. I grew up in a semi-rural area, so a very particular landscape. I’m interested in questions of: what do we know about the places we’re living in, and how do we define our ideas of home or a lack of home, and how does all that affect our experiences?
AR: Tell me a little bit about your writing process? How do you begin writing a poem? How do you know when it’s finished?
MK: I would also like to know that! My writing process, like everyone’s, definitely changes a lot. The constant in my writing process is that I’m a very slow writer. I feel like I have to let ideas sit for a really long time. I definitely have never been, and don’t think I will ever be, super prolific just because everything takes me so long, and I’ve learned to be okay with that. For a long time I was like, ‘I need to change this about myself. I need to be more efficient,’ but that’s just not how it works for me. In terms of actually drafting, I’m big on lists. I’ll keep lists of images and sensations in my journal, and then when I sit down with those, I can usually produce a semi-coherent draft in a sitting or two. And then my revision process is months long, as in, the poem usually just needs to sit that long before I can go back to it. In terms of knowing when something is finished, I feel like I could keep tinkering forever. I’ll come back to a poem however many months later and find something in it to work on, so sometimes I’ll just send stuff out as a way to impose an artificial ending on it. I’m trying not to be too precious about it. Sometimes I’m just like ‘Okay, this is going to be done for now. I can always come back to it, but it’s going to be done for now because I’m sending it out for publication.’
AR: You’re currently pursuing your MFA at UW–Madison. How has this shaped your writing, either the process or the end result?
MK: This particular program is pretty focused on giving us time to write. It’s allowed me to slow down a little bit, be less focused on academic rigor, and prioritize my creative work. That gave me a feeling of freedom to experiment and play a little bit more, less of a sense of urgency, which I appreciate. I also teach as part of the program. I think that has shaped my writing in the sense that to teach creative writing, I have to be able to articulate what it is that makes a poem work, or even just basic craft things that maybe I would have done intuitively and wouldn’t have stopped to actually think about unless I had to explain them. Finally, I’ve been writing with a cohort of four other people for the past two years. That’s definitely shaped my writing for the better because I trust them a lot. We’ve seen so much of each other’s work, and there’s not very many circumstances in which you consistently engage with someone’s poems for that long of a period of time. That’s been really helpful to me and hopefully to them too.
AR: You’re the editor in chief at Frontier Poetry. What is that work like? How does that affect your personal writing process?
MK: I started this job, this editorial role, really recently, so I’m definitely still figuring out what a balance looks like in terms of creative work and editorial work. But two things stand out to me. One is that this particular journal, Frontier, has a focus on new and emerging writers, and I love working with poets who are discovering poetry, who are learning. That gives me a lot of energy, and it makes me really excited. Seeing all the personal stories also, the cover letters and stuff that come across my submission queue, makes me excited to write in general and to uplift other people’s writing. I think those feed each other. This is the surprising part — apparently, I really love administrative work! The majority of my position is spreadsheets, emails, day-to-day scheduling and organization. I do a little bit of everything. That’s really fun, and it’s also very separate from my creative output, which I was worried would be in jeopardy if I was doing a position in the writing field. I think that’s always a concern.
AR: Do you have a favorite poem that you’ve written, or one you’re particularly proud of?
MK: It’s not exactly a favorite, but I wrote one last year that I was really excited about because it felt different than the kind of poems I usually write. It was a break-up poem, which is actually very funny to me. I think I’m proud of it or excited by it because it does in just one poem a bit of what I’m hoping to accomplish in my work as a body, my work at large. I was really thinking explicitly that I wanted to question how intimate and particular relationships between individual people are affected by or are part of larger systems and historical forces. I think it at least tries to do that, and it’s cool to me to see what that looks like. It’s also a prose poem, which was fun for me too because it’s not something I do a lot.
AR: What are you working on right now?
MK: You can’t see this, but I’m staring at a bunch of paper taped to my wall right now, which is my thesis! I’m working on my second draft of my MFA thesis, which I’m hoping will become my first draft of a full-length manuscript, fingers-crossed. We’ll see what happens. It is basically just a curation of stuff I’ve been working on over the past few years under some of the themes that we’ve just been talking about. It’s named after the river that runs through the valley I grew up in. I’m in the structuring, organizing phase of it, which is really hard. I’m definitely feeling kind of stumped by it.
AR: What is bringing you joy right now? Where do you find hope?
MK: A lot of things! I feel very grateful for the people who are in my life right now, and for where I am. All of it feels very good. This sounds nerdy, but I’m really enjoying being bad at learning a language right now. That’s bringing me a lot of joy. I’m learning Korean. I haven’t tried to learn a language from scratch for, possibly, a decade. I forgot how completely humbling it is. I think I love it so much because it makes me think very intentionally about approaching words, and vocabulary, and structures of grammar as a stranger when those are maybe not things I would think about explicitly in English. That scratches an itch that I’m sure has to do with writing poetry too. I just love thinking about language in these ways.
