About Stephanie Choi & Asmal Al-Masyabi & Sabrina Spann:
STEPHANIE CHOI's first poetry collection The Lengest Neoi ( U of Iowa, 2024) was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work can also be found in West Branch, Copper Nickel, and Poetry Northwest. She was the 2023-24 Poet-in-Residence at Sewanee: The University of the South and one of Poets and Writers Magazine’s Debut Poets of 2024. She is an Assistant Professor at Oklahoma State University. ASMA AL-MASYABI is a poet, writer, and visual artist based in Colorado. She is a ruth weiss Foundation Emerging Poet Award winner and her writing can be found in The Cincinnati Review, Subnivean, the Santa Clara Review, and more. She is a University of Colorado Denver creative writing graduate and intern at Copper Nickel. SABRINA SPANN is a recipient of the Reisher Scholarship and a scholar of film and literature. She is an intern at Copper Nickel and University of Colorado Denver graduate.
You are a poet with a debut collection The Lengest Neoi, which is a recipient of the Iowa Poetry Prize, but you’re also a visual artist with pieces like “Lane Line as Spine,” at the University of Utah. Could you talk a little bit about the process of working within two mediums, such as the connections between them as creative outlets, as well as what you find engaging in their differences?
It’s so interesting you found “Lane Line as Spine” because that project was definitely an anomaly for me! A friend of mine in the Environmental Humanities program at the University of Utah organized it and I was at Utah getting my MFA at the time. I’ve always been interested in multimedia and visual poetics, but I would not consider myself a visual artist at all so being a part of the art collective that I made that piece through was challenging for me. It was always more of a conceptual piece for me, and I think this is the way I think as a poet too, so I can see how as an artist, no matter what medium I am working in, I still have a similar process and vision. I also think about materiality a lot in my work on the page: the black strands that separate each section of The Lengest Neoi are a photocopy of strands of my hair, the sonnet crown is placed in the middle/the “spine” of the book, the crossword in the crown invites the reader to participate in the text and become a part of the poem/the book itself. So, in a way, I think about embodiment a lot too, which often feels more present in the process of making and experiencing visual art than literary art—painting or sculpting requires more physicality than writing with a pen or typing. But, I think, for me, my goal is to write poems that create a depth of image and embodiment within language itself; and that my book might feel like walking through various exhibits and rooms at a museum.
Your work involves questions about language, body, and identity; you also teach poetry. As a writer, how do you approach these complex topics? As a teacher, how would you advise new poets who want to work through these challenging concepts?
Always start with the smallest, most specific and possibly, on the surface, insignificant detail—this is what I try to practice and what I teach. I don’t set out to write a poem about identity or my body perse, I start with my mother’s hands folding meat into wonton wrappers, gazing into the bowl of meat, then saying “we have more meat than skin” or when I’m at Pilates after a long demoralizing day navigating University bureaucracy and my teacher adjusts my shoulders, says “chin up.” I think it’s best to just write without setting out to write “about” anything—the obsessions and the concepts you want to work through will be worked through if you are bringing yourself to the page in a devoted practice.
You include Chinese characters throughout your collection, sometimes braiding translation and transliteration in as well. What was the process like in deciding when to translate and transliterate, and when to leave the characters without either?
I personally cannot read or write in Chinese, so in some ways I wanted the poems’ speakers to enact the practice/process of translation itself. I don’t speak any Mandarin—my family speaks Cantonese and it’s always been an oral language for me. I also only have a very basic comprehension of Cantonese, so the poems with translation involved are kind of meant to reveal this in an embodied way. For the transliterations, I wanted to think about the way that part of translation creates a soundscape and illegibility on the page – I think leaving characters untranslated also does this. Since Chinese is pictographic, I was also thinking about the visual aspect of the characters and how this could create tension and harmony with the language of the poems themselves.
The Lengest Neoi includes a lot of different poetic forms. How do they typically inform your writing process?
I really like writing in received forms and also experimental forms. I think in general it just keeps things interesting—! I also like to challenge myself and stretch myself so trying to write in a range of forms is creatively productive for me. Sometimes I begin with the content and then the form finds it, other times—like with “A Tattoo for my Mother”—I had an instinct that the sestina would be the right form to explore that experience/narrative, so I forced the sestina onto my desire to write about my first tattoo and my mom’s tattooed eyebrows in the same poem.
Can you tell us what you’re working on next?
I’m writing toward a documentary project and experimenting with some documentary techniques, which has been fun and challenging. I’m diving into a couple specific histories and archives—the eight Chinese passengers on Titanic, Polly Bemis, and my own paper son grandfather who served in WWII. I’ve been researching quite a bit and practicing persona poems. I’ve really enjoyed writing into Polly’s voice so far.