Interviews: “I’m obsessed with pettiness”: An Interview with Su Cho”

Su Cho and I gathered together about six months after the debut of her first book, The Symmetry of Fish. An incredible triptych imagining what Cho calls an “idealized past, present, and future,” The Symmetry of Fish weave together a stunning interlay of image, symmetry, and (dare I say it) liminality. Together, Cho and I discuss first-book feelings, the bodily nature of language, and the influence of silence in poetry (and what Midwestern cornfields might have to teach us about it).

-Diamonde Forde

∞

Diamond: At the time of this recording, it will be a little over six months since your book’s debut. The Symmetry of Fish is your first book, of course, and I think we both know what a thrilling but dizzying experience a first book is. First books require a lot of confidence and trust, both in yourself and the work you’re putting into the world. How are you feeling now that The Symmetry of Fish is in the world? Has its release changed or influenced your relationship to the poems in the book? 

Su: You know, when I saw the questions, I was really thankful for this question because, for me, I don’t know how you felt, but after two months, in December, I was like, well that was a good run. [laughs] I was like, that was good. Yeah, yeah. Some people talked about it. Some people read it, and that was good. It’s dead to me now. 

[Diamond and Su laugh]

Su: So, it’s crazy that it’s only been six months. My friends would say, and my partner—it doesn’t feel that way to me, and so honestly, I feel like really egotistical and really humble about it too. 

Diamond: Mm.

Su: I tell people that I didn’t know what the word humble meant until the book came out. Because I felt so, Oh God, this sounds so corny, but it felt so undeserving, but also like I deserved it all and more. I’m a really ambitious and impatient person for poetry, it’s funny, but I think I just had to like—this reminds me of the question that you’re going to ask later about binaries, but it felt like I had to exist in the moment, which I don’t do a lot, because I feel like as poets we like to think about the past a lot, and the future, but I have a hard time thinking about like what am I thinking now, so I felt really lucky to do events, and go places, and meet people, and travel. I felt very cool, but also, I would just feel sick to my stomach before each thing.

Diamond: Yes! Yes!

Su: But I also had to just remind myself that this is, and I tell my students this: poetry is the dumbest thing we could do with our time.

[Both laugh] 

Su: But also, the most important thing we could do with our time, and so I kind of had to eat my own advice and see what it’s like. So, to get to the second part of your question, it feels good that it’s only been six months because to me it feels like it’s been six years and no one cares, so I was really touched by your questions, and also, everyone says this but even when the book went to production, I felt like a different person. Having the honor of getting to read my poems to different people, you kind of have to put yourself in the mind .  of these poems are cool, and so I realized what I was doing was just reading the poems that I felt were the more compelling to me, and then reading it aloud and honestly, in a narcissistic way, being like oh wow, these are good when I was reading them. And then as soon as the poem was over, and I’d stop, I’d be like why did I read that, that poem was horrible. I don’t know, that’s how I feel. 

Diamond: Thank you so much for talking about the first book experience and being so real about it because part of the reason the book feels so odd (and this is me talking from my experience, mind you) but I feel like I’ve been writing the poems for years before the book gets presented, and so by the time the book drops, I’m kind of tired of these poems just a little bit. I’m also just still startled by how many people are still encountering the book. I don’t know if I will ever get used to that. There’s just a part of me that forgets the book exists, and so when people I don’t know reach out to me and are like, I loved Mother Body, I’m just like, what? How’d you find it? It’s just a strange question I ask. 

Su: It’s weird. We need money to deal with our feelings around this. Someone needs to pay people during the six months after. 

[Diamond and Su laugh]

Diamond: So, for the folks who are going to be reading this and thinking about the first book process, do you have any advice for them?

Su: Yeah, what was most helpful for me...  You've also worked as an editor. So, I'm just really good at completely compartmentalizing my creative self with the business self, which has served me really well. That was really helpful for me. But what wasn't really helpful for me was that I wasn't writing at all. Some people were like, why would you say that? But I haven't really written anything solid, except for some short essays I asked my publicist to get me to write. Except for that, I haven't written real poems in like 2 years, and I need to do that—write poems. 

Honestly, if it wasn't for my other writing friends like Marianne Chan, Lisa Low, Danni Quintos, and Anni Lu—we all had books come out at the same time, and they were fantastic, they were writing poems to put into their book that was coming out every day. They were writing so much. And so, during the pandemic, we had a Zoom group where we’d just write poems, and I was like, I just want to hang out—I don’t know if I want to write. So, they would still be my friends, I wrote some poems, I made just four, and I think two of them made it into the book. Or maybe three. 

Diamond: That counts!

Su: And those were my favorite ones. I think if I didn’t have those two, maybe it’s just two, I would be less in love with the book, because I have to have some of the current me in it. So, for people putting together a first book, it’s really just the self you want to see in a physical form. And it’s okay if you don’t like that self, too. Because who does?

See, that wasn’t advice. That was just my experience. But I guess it could be advice. That was most helpful for me—to not take it so seriously. Another poet said to me, you just kind of get over it in your first book and then you can do whatever you want later. That can be really helpful. That’s what I will say. 

Diamond: I think all of that counts as advice to me. Creating some of that downtime for you to explore other avenues of writing, but also explore community. All of those are healthy ways we get back into writing. So, I think you’re doing the right thing. 

[Su laughs]

Su: Thank you. 

Diamond: So, let’s talk about the book. In particular, I’m struck, after reading the book, how much binaural opposition seems to be an organizing force here. What I mean is, The Symmetry of Fish engages actively with binaries every step of the  way. It seems to suggest these forces are unavoidable and, maybe even a little necessary? 

Maybe I’m misreading that, but I can’t help but notice your collection mourns and sings because, it seems to say, those two forces cannot exist without the other. We cannot mourn the grandfather in the first section of the book, for instance, without also singing about the joys he brought, no, still brings. There’s no death without life, no life without death.  

And there are of course other binaries central to the book: a sense of otherness and belonging. And the presupposed differences between parent and child. What I love about your book is that there are slippages, it troubles the perceived fixed dynamic of these binaries. For instance, in the poem “Hello, My Parents Don’t Speak English Well, How Can I Help You?” the child speaker (I use child to invoke relationship here, not age) must step into a parental role through their efficiency with and affinity for English. The census collection, as an external force of governance, infantilizes the parents while also forcing the daughter into a role of protection.

In a book that literally invokes symmetry, how do you see yourself actively engaging with binaries throughout the book, Su? What do you feel are the most definitive organizing features of your book’s three sections? 

Su: I feel like I could just say what you just said and answer the question.

[Diamond and Su laugh]

Su: I’m really grateful you laid it all out like that. Very few people do, so when I read that question, I was like oh dang. [laughs]. It’s funny you mention the symmetry and binaries because that’s how I talk too. As soon as I say something, I have to say the opposite. I always say I have my real answer and my joke answer. My joke answer is, I would use the word liminal, but it’s out of fashion now. I see, I used to throw that word around a lot. You know that TikTok parody of the liminal guy about immigrants? [laughs]

I think, for a long time, I thought being in a liminal space meant I didn’t have to define where I was and for me that was an easy way out of having to talk about it. I think I was misunderstanding the word, which is fine. I don’t know. I was so obsessed with this book and thinking about organizing it into three parts. I was so obsessed with being accurate and truthful, and then I realized I kept getting stuck because nothing was true. That’s why I like saying one thing and saying the opposite. Because where I exist is in the middle somewhere. This is so poet-y of me to say, but when you’re in the middle of things, you can see what’s around you and not exactly where you are. But I guess some people would say that is the present. But that’s my way of being hopeful and, eventually throughout the poem, I’ll figure out how I feel about things. 

I always say I have too many thoughts and feelings, so I don’t like to talk about anything. I’ll just write a poem about it five years later. Which is a problem for relationships sometimes. 

[Diamond and Su laugh]

Su: I’ll just write a poem about it years later, and you’ll know how I felt. 

Oh, then the organizing features of the book’s three sections. I can give a concrete answer to this: I was really trying to organize the book, at first, into chronological order. And then I realized the book would be front-loaded with the poems that I wrote earliest, which weren’t my strongest I don’t think. There’s a poem in there, the grandpa poem [“밤: (v) to give death; (n) chestnut, night”]—it took me ten years to get into that form. 

One of the first poems I wrote for workshop was this imagined funeral for my grandfather because I couldn’t go—only my parents went. It was expensive to fly then. I imagined it based on a funeral I saw when I was very little. But you know, it was a crap poem. It was being imagistic without saying anything. It took me ten years to finally get to that form and the way it is now, and it was the line “ Is there no magic from my mouth / when I say that my grandfather is dead— / that I still don’t really care?” I was like, I think that’s the most truthful thing I have ever said in my entire life, but also the opposite is true because that whole poem is about caring. 

The way that I eventually organized the book is my idealized past, present, and future. One of the first poems I wrote that I felt was good, that I wrote when I was in undergrad, is in the last section of the book. I wanted to imagine what life could be, and these are the poems that I felt were messing around with that idea. And I’ll stop there. 

Diamond: I love that. I love the ways you’re mirroring in your poetic process the ways we unpack past experiences. It really does take a wrestling. We think we understand what happened, then we get to a point of discomfort and confession where we realize, oh, this is what really happened. But that recognition and that realization is what allows us to revise. 

So, you thinking about the idealized past, idealized present, the idealized future is that act of revision. Starting with a memory and reapproaching the memory to allow us to move into that more idealized moment makes so much sense to me. 

Su: Thank you. I love that summary. 

Diamond: It is. It’s really powerful, and I think the most powerful part of it is that you’re allowing the poems to surprise you. I think that this book is full of surprise. In particular, the ways that you use imagery. You said in the grandfather poem it was guided at first by imagery and that imagery was a route toward avoidance. I think that when you create that beautiful balance of imagery as a way to situate yourself in yourself, Su, that’s when it becomes super powerful. 

Su: Hm.

Diamond: So, what I really loved was how sensual I felt like the book was. Especially in the opening and ending sections. You have a superpower when it comes to engaging the senses.

Su: That’s the nicest thing I think anyone has said to me about my writing. 

Diamond: It’s true! Especially the mouth. My mouth was so delighted reading your poems. The ways that you invoke taste but also texture. You literally shape the viscosity of language with the mouth, and I haven’t thought about that stuff since Kindergarten, as a small girl tasked with prodding and imitating my tongue into certain phonetic shapes. Oo, oo, oo. Ah, ah, ah. 

I think that as we learn a greater proficiency with language, as we learn the complex mental processes that language can translate, we disengage from that starting point, the moment where language begins in the body. Can you speak a little more on what you see as the physical connection between language and the body?

Su: Thank you so much for putting that so eloquently. 

I use a lot of Korean in the book. And by a lot, I mean just sometimes. And I realized that my quest for historical accuracy in my own poems kept failing because I kept avoiding putting Korean in there because I was obsessed with the reader—I was obsessed with audience. I still am, but now in a different way. I realized with the poem, “[가시]: (n) thorn, splinter, fish bone” I have certain words that resonate when I think about a memory. 

Korean is the language of my childhood. When I think about my family memories...I still speak to my parents in Korean. It’s not good Korean; it gets worse as I age. But that’s the only language that exists in there, and I had to figure out how to put this in. 

When I talk to my parents, it’s very difficult for me to speak about adult things because when I talk in Korean, because my mouth fumbles more and more, I feel like I regress every time to a child. In a way, it makes it accurate emotionally when we’re talking but it’s just really frustrating, too. It requires a lot of patience. 

And so, what I wanted to really do in the book was think about the audience again, but I just wanted to recreate that frustration, honestly. That’s why I start with “How to Say Water,” because all the ways I could explain it make sense, but that’s the best way I can explain it. I used to help others pronounce English words, especially words with ‘r’s or ‘l’s are hard; the reader then has to make a decision, you can’t just Google translate it from your eyeballs (although I’m sure in ten years you can)—

[Diamond and Su laugh]

Su: —but you have to go ugh, how annoying or I wonder what this says and move on, or you actually figure it out, which you probably can’t unless I lay it out for you, or maybe you know some Korean, and maybe you just know and move on. 

It doesn’t matter to me what the reader decides, even if they go God, that was annoying because they had to be annoyed by it, and because I think that's the best thing a poem can do on the page. I just wanted that pause for people, just like I have to pause. Like my parents have to pause. Like anybody who speaks another language has to pause. I just love recreating that pause and frustration because, to me, that was the most accurate thing I could do on the page.

Diamond: And it really does read as an invitation to me, Su. As much as it is a kind of barrier, it's also an invitation. Because we live in a technologically savvy moment, I can pull out my Google Translate, take the phone picture and be like, ah! But that still requires an active choice and a commitment on your audience’s part, like you said. And that does forced them to pause, but it also asks them to make a decision. How closely am I going to actively engage in this poem, this moment, this language? 

It shifts responsibility onto your audience in lovely ways, and I'm kind of enamored with it. I loved it. I loved the breaks of Korean, I loved the moments where we resisted translation, I loved it because it made me a more responsible reader. I felt like it became my duty to decide this is a language I want to live inside my body. The ways that you were forced and tasked with having multiple languages living inside of you, now, as a reader, I can kind of take that on, too.

Su: Mm. 

Diamond: I don’t want to say pettiness, but my brain reaches for pettiness because I love being petty—

Su: I love that your brain reached for pettiness. 

[Diamond and Su laugh]

Diamond: As much as it is a kind of petty choice, it’s also a choice of love, too. It can be both of those things at the same time. I’m obsessed, honestly. 

[Both laugh again]

Diamond: I love the little moments of puzzle and joy and figuring things out. But I’m also obsessed with language and the way language fails. So, I felt like you were creating this moment for the possibility of language’s failure, that if I decide I don’t want to take that step forward with the Korean language, I’ve decided I want to live in the moment of perceived failure. Again, I’m obsessed. 

I’m going to say I’m obsessed a lot, but it’s true. I’m obsessed with this book. 

Su: I think the title of this interview should be, “I’m obsessed with pettiness.” 

Diamond: More poems should be petty, to be honest. 

[Su and Diamond laugh]

Diamond: So, in an interview with Ashley J. Chong of Cold Tea Collective, you discussed the role of silence in the Midwest, citing that the “vastness leaves a lot of time to think about yourself.”  I was moved by this moment, thinking about what a thematic force the Midwest has been for your writing, Su. Indiana does show up as a location in the collection, but so does New York. So, I think the real strength of the Midwest here manifests in the quietness of your poems.

As a writer, understatement and silence seem to be the most apt tools in your wheelhouse. The silence between what is spoken and what is left unsaid. You ask us to look between the language, and if you had lazy readers, they would miss a lot. 

In particular, an example of this moment as silence as a tool in your writing, I’m thinking about that poem “At an Apple Orchard in Door County, Wisconsin” silence  takes on many forms. It invokes that binary again, where safety can be oppression but also safety. That there are some ways in which the quiet threat of eyes feels preferable to audible, racist vitriol that follows. I love that tension because the poem is thinking so much about belonging, and if we aren’t paying attention to what’s being unsaid, we’re missing that. So much is happening and it’s such an understated poem. 

So, I’d like to follow up and ask you what you think the Midwest and its silence has taught you, now that you are no longer in the Midwest, and how you could be exploring silence in your poetic work going forward? 

Su: I’m really glad you pointed out that poem. You know how, in our heads, we have poems that will never get hyped. That was a poem. I was like, ah, it’s just in there. 

Diamond: It was my fave. 

Su: Aw. I appreciate that. And I appreciate that you read that interview. It was one of the first in-depth interviews I did with someone about the book. It was really special. 

With silence, it’s kind of like you’re just forced to exist without bumping into something for a bit. Even when you’re looking at things. I love corn fields. They soothe me. But if that’s all there is, you don’t have to think about anything else until you see something else. Which, if you’re in a car, you’re not going to see anything else. And I think that's where it comes from. Because, for these quiet poems, it’s like what do we fill the space with instead? And usually, it’s nothing. I would like to fill it with nothing, but that’s not what peace is. It’s when you can fill it with something that you like. 

It really was a question of, how long can you go in this space before that silence is disrupted? I think maybe I like cataloguing the things that disrupt my silence. It’s comfortable to walk in the world without having to do or say anything. I think it’s important to articulate when that silence is disrupted. Usually by people. [laughs]

Diamond: I want to turn to that same interview in my final question, Su. You explained to Chong that “When you’re American, you’re constantly balancing how much of which part you are and it’s really tiring to me.” We both know marginalized writers are consistently tasked with translating themselves and their experiences for white readers. We also know there’s a certain expectation or scope under which our experiences can fall; deviation from this range is often read as “inauthentic.” It is, as you said, an exhausting process.

It’s also why I love how much of this book refuses translation, refuses explanation. In a landscape where you do not have to perform or explain yourself for white audiences or, in a world where you truly define how much of you is being seen in the poem, what do you hope your audience sees in your work? What parts of you are you begging your audience to carry from the collection? 

Su: Dang.

Diamond: It’s a meaty question, I’m sorry. I like to end with big ones.

Su: I like big questions. I think when you peel away all the “Asian American woman” blah blah blah, in an ideal world, which we don’t live in, which we will never live in, I think the ultimate trophy for me is if readers only saw the moments when I was trying to be funny. [laughs]

So much of my humor is about identity, too, but I just want people to see the kernel of humor. That’s the essence of any person is when they’re being funny because that’s when they’re feeling themselves. When you’re most “you,” I think. That would be my dream. That would be fantastic. But obviously, it’s not like I set out to write funny poems. Sometimes I think I’m funny. Sometimes I think I’m not. 

When readers can laugh at something—the poem makes them laugh even when it makes them uncomfortable, I think that’s my ideal. In one of my Midwest poems, “My Bed Shakes and I Assume the Ghosts Are Finally Getting Me” about an earthquake in Indiana, one of the first italicized parts is “isn’t it funny / how every Asian girl we know is engaged or about to be engaged/ to a white boy” and I am obviously trying to be funny and it’s half-true. And I remember reading that somewhere in Texas, and you could hear some chuckles, and I was like: you can laugh. It’s funny. It’s exaggerated, but also not. I think that’s my ideal.

Diamond: I want to thank you again for donating your time with Honey. Love you and your work so much. 

Su: No, thank you. I just knew I wanted to have a conversation with you. These were really good questions. It feels really nice when your book feels completely seen, when someone can articulate that, and get to talk to someone about it. What a treat. 

Diamond: Thank you, Su.

About Su Cho

Su Cho is a poet, essayist, and the author of The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin Books 2022) which won the 2021 National Poetry Series and featured in NPR, New York Times Books, and Roxane Gay’s favorite books of 2022. She is currently an assistant professor at Clemson University.

About Diamond Forde

Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. She serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary, the fiction editor of Nat. Brut, and she lives in Asheville with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.