Desire, the Construction of Audience, and the Construction of Self in Monica Youn’s “From From”

Desire, the Construction of Audience, and the Construction of Self in Monica Youn’s From From 

Interview completed on February 28, 2024

Diamond Forde: First, let me just say that “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)” is a masterclass in setting up a collection. Many of the themes I would like to discuss in greater detail appear in this first poem, so I’ll probably mention it a lot. One of the first moments I want to talk about deeper is when the poem reads, “Race is not usually considered an example of desire.” It was a gut-punch moment. But it also encouraged me to consider the ways desire acts in the collection as a whole.

Correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that within the book, the racialized body, in particular the Asian body, is divided in a tension between external desire and internal desire, and that the subjects of externalized desire most happen to be white. 

One of my favorite poems in the book, “In Passive Voice” demonstrates incredible range, emotion, and length, exploring a variety of topics around racism and anti-Blackness, including the 2021 Atlanta shootings, in which a white man murders eight people–”six Asian American women and two other people at three Asian spas” because he wanted to “‘eliminate’ ‘temptation.’” This feels to me the exact moment in question when the poem interconnects race and desire, although the book offers several moments in childhood and adulthood that center that same tension. In all these instances, desire is an outlet for Whiteness to inflict violence.

So, I wanted to take this chance to ask you: what is the role of desire within the book? Does the shape of desire shift depending on who or what desires? Does externalized desire (or desire outside of the Asian subject) act upon, corrupt, or disrupt internalized desire in the Asian characters within the book?

Monica Youn: I mean, I think desire is, if I were to pick one overarching subject for all my books, it would be desire. But maybe desire and distrust. Because part of what I think about is, why is it that we desire the things that we desire? Who or what has taught us to desire those things?  And I think that that's true if I'm looking at this both outwardly toward the external, desiring subject and when I'm projecting my own desires outwards. 

I mean with regard to the externalized desire, it's impossible to think about white male desire for an Asian female person without thinking of colonialism, racism, and violence. That's just inextricably bound up in the whole, you know, me love you long time, lotus blossom… that whole history that I try, in the collection, to pull back to at least as far back as the Greeks. This whole idea of the dragon lady, the lotus blossom, the sort of sexual taboo mysterious, you know, Asian woman who is an object—an object of desire—because she never quite attains the status of the human. 

But then I'm also interested in the sort of permeable threshold between Self and non-Self. The first book I wrote along these lines, I was thinking about romantic love, which was my book Ignatz, and kind of thinking, “why is my romantic love constructed in such a masochistic way”? [laughs] What are the models that have brought me to that? 

My next book, Blackacre, was kind of around the model of motherhood, family, heteronormativity. You know, various norms that were structuring my desire and how I came to want what I thought that I wanted in terms of my family life, my personal life, etc. 

And then this book is structured around racialized desire. Both me looking out… both me as a racialized subject looking outwards and me being spectated. I think it's important in the book that, for example, the quasi-autobiographical third person “she” of the Deracinations series does have a crush on the white racist boy who's, you know, the lead singer of the band “White Minority”, which is actually a true fact for my junior high school—

[Diamond and Monica laugh]

And what does that mean that she's understanding herself as a sexualized subject? Or as a sexual person, and she's coming to that awakening through this racialized gaze? Is not as if she has some pure sense of her own sexuality that is prior to that construction. I mean, she's coming to sexuality within that construction.

Diamond: I recognize that my last question is largely rooted in Self constructions–the makings of identity and home, nurture versus nature, etc. In an interview with Saeri Plagmann in The PEN Ten, you mentioned that part of your goal was to create a home in the “liminal zone between so-called ‘homeland’ and country of residence and/or citizenship” and when I read that, I wondered what stories you saw guiding that construction. 

Many of the poems, especially earlier on, rely on characters from myth or parable, to shape the poem’s rhetorical mode. It made me think of something I read by Thomas King recently, in The Truth about Stories, that there are stories that “control” our lives–control who we are and how we interact with one another. 

So my question is in two parts: first, what did you see as the advantage of myth or parable in explorations of Self, belonging, or home; and two, if you could name any story that controls you, what story might that be? 

Monica: Yes, absolutely. I loved that question. I think that, for me, thinking about things that shape you, shape yourself--because I was raising my son, I wrote this book from the time my son was 0 to the time my son was 6. So, you know, a large part of my mind at any given time was preoccupied with how am I helping shape this little self and how am I getting out of the way of this little self, right?

Diamond: Yeah.

Monica: And part of what I think about very carefully are the stories that shape you. People are always telling me that I'm an ekphrastic poet, that I'm always responding or commenting on various stories on various figures, but I don't think of myself and art as being that separate. Like, I think in some way, the art that you love constitutes you. You bring it into yourself, you make it part of yourself, and you do so from a very young age. I mean, you can think about the children's books that you read a gazillion times until they were tattered—those become a part of you. You can think of the music that you love as doing something similar. The visual works that kind of set your aesthetics. 

You know, all of this—it's part of the process of self-making, and so when I was thinking about this book I was looking at two sources primarily: I was looking at children's books, and I was looking at Greek mythology. And I was looking at Greek mythology because when I was a kid, I was the biggest Greek mythology nerd on the planet. This was even before the Percy Jackson books—

[Diamond and Monica laugh]

I think you find out what stories control you by [recognizing] the stories that you keep coming back to. And for some reason, I have always come back to the story of Pasiphaë. She appears in my, let me think—yeah, in my first book. I can’t remember whether she’s in my second book, but she definitely has a cameo in my third book, and then in this fourth book she finally gets her own title. You know, at least half of a title poem. 

I mean the reason I'm so fascinated by Pasiphaë is, first of all, she is like the quintessential crazy rich Asian of Greek mythology. She comes from this notorious family who were culturally constructed as Asian, as colonial, as dangerous, taboo, magical, sexual, etc. But secondly, you know, she's always depicted as a figure of lust. In the Western consciousness, Dante places her as the prototypical figure of lust in the Purgatorio, Ovid writes about her as the figure of lust. And it’s just like, what is it about Pasiphaë that brings down all this hatred upon her? This woman who, if you actually follow the logic of the myth, was subject to a curse because of the greed of her husband. What is it that makes her so hated? 

And it was that she dared to take control of her sexuality. That she said, “I want this. I'm going to have a plan, and I'm going to go after it. I'm going to get someone who works for me to build me this contraption in order to get me this bull.” And, and I think that's what draws down this hatred upon her—the fact that she has agency and deliberation in her choices. This is why she comes into my third book. You can think of her as, like, the first artificial insemination. You know, assisted reproduction technology. Sort of [an] avatar in Western culture. 

And, and the same sort of hatred that is directed toward women who, for example, use IVF, who are [not] infertile is the same sort of hatred directed at Pasiphaë. She is putting too much thought and too much deliberation and too much control into what should be a natural and passive process. She should just be a woman submitting to desire. She shouldn't be herself, controlling her desire or the object of her desire.

So, that’s why Pasiphaë. Even though she's a very obscure figure, the amount of hatred she gets is disproportionate.

Diamond: My last three questions are all focused on writing decisions in From From, and to ask those questions I want to return to the book’s first poem, “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)” (which, I might add Honey readers, creates a beautiful bookend with the book’s last poem. I won’t go into detail about it all here, but trust me, you need to read these poems together.) 

Something that comes up thematically in the first poem is this idea of regulation, embodied in the poem’s many “containers.” The poem opens, “One figure is female, the other is male. / Both are contained” (1-2). There are so many containers invoked deliberately in this poem–race, Asianness, Colchis and Korea, to name a few that appear, but I was surprised how each line also encouraged me to think about the poem as a container, too. 

I’m inclined to read “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)” as an ars poetica–a study of poetry just as much as it is a study of figure, and I know the poem already speaks to art writ-large, but poetry as a medium is obsessed with containing–fixated on smallness and concision (which many of the poems in From From disrupts, in my opinion).There is something uncomfortable about trying to take the racialized Subject (or any Subject deemed “excessive” against the “mythical norm”) into a poem and, despite that, we try to center ourselves anyway. 

What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of the poem as a container? are there ways in which the poem as a container lended to or detracted from your aforementioned goal of constructing a home in a liminal zone? 

Monica: Yeah, I mean… the book as a whole had a couple of goals. I think one of which was this liminal space of From From, this liminal space of, sort of, unbelonging, which I felt like asserting as an actual identity. I mean, the number of diasporic friends who I have who think of that as more of a homeland than either here or there, right? It’s astonishing. It’s a real place. It’s an unnamed place, and it has actuality in people’s consciousness, so why should it not be allowed to constitute an identity. Where can we stand up for the deracinated? 

So that's one thing, and that I think of that as a positive framing of the space in the same way that naming can be helpful. A container is a kind of a name, or a name is a kind of a container. But names can also be used, of course, negatively, which is, I think, what the container poems in this explore.

But what the container does, and why I like thinking about it as a container, as a spatial thing rather than as a name is that the container makes very clear who is inside and outside the container and what its boundaries are in a way that makes audience salient.

And I think that contemporary poetry is an art form that often does not pay enough attention to who is the audience for this work. What are the demographics of this audience? Is the audience monolithic?

Now, of course, there are, poets who name certain audiences in their work. Like, I'm thinking of Danez Smith’s “Dear White America” versus their book Homies. Those are set up for two completely different audiences in a very intentional way. But I'm also thinking, of what it means to… I don't know, to call attention to the characteristics of the audience, and the differential receptivity of the audience in a more pointed or structural way.

So, for example, you can think of, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, and she's somebody I talked to a lot in coming up with this book. You can think of the “you” in the prose poem in Citizen—the famous second person [POV] where you are standing on the steps of a house—and the “you” that she inhabits isn't empty space, but the empty space is in the shape of a black woman. And people can step into and out of that empty space. And some people are habituated to various aspects of that space, and some people are not, and they will feel that dishabituation as discomfort. It is only by keeping that space empty, by not putting the characteristics of Claudia Rankine or any of the various interview subjects that she talked to into that space, that she is enabling that structural thing. 

I’m also thinking of Jackie Sibblies Drury's play Fairview (which I watched with Claudia, actually)  in which the audience at the end is divided, so that those who identify by race are invited to step up on the stage, the black cast members step into the audience, and there's this kind of reversal of spectatorship. 

So I think I was trying to do something like that, which is to say “okay, here's the container that has been constructed with you, the dominant audience’s complicity, and here I am inside the box in one role, and I'm going to step outside the box, but I'm not going to be like the nice little tour guide saying like, ‘oh, here's this exotic box,’ you know, here's the terrible thing that happened into it.” I'm gonna make you very aware that you were standing outside the box. That there are some things that you can see. That there are some things that you cannot see. And what is your complicity both in having this box, maintaining this box, but also in spectating this box, in taking pleasure from the boundaries of the box, whether those boundaries contain a secret, whether they contain something that's taboo, a hot button, etc.

Like, what advantages are you deriving from the confinement of what is inside the box?

Diamond: This conversation, especially around the use of the second-person in Rankine’s book, reminds me of another question that came up for me while I was engaging with From From. I was wondering about the decision to withhold the “I” as the poem’s subject until late in the collection. I was wondering if you might speak to the decision to withhold the “I,” how that came about, and what you felt were the advantages in that withholding. 

Monica: For me, it's not so much a decision as it is just… a mode. I am somebody who has always been really uncomfortable inhabiting the autobiographical “I”. I mean, maybe it's just because I grew up a very private person, possibly because I had hypercritical parents (laughing) who if I showed them anything would immediately criticize it. So, I just kind of learned to keep myself to myself.

But also, you know, and this is goes into this whole like desire and distrust paradigm that we've been talking about—I don't really have, at this point, a very strong sense of Self.

Like if you grow up in a certain way, and you are constituted in a large way by your desires—by what you want—and then you start casting a lot of doubt on that. You start exploring the sources, oftentimes the very ugly sources, of what it is that you want, then you start saying, “okay, well, what is it that I feel comfortable asserting?” Not a lot.

So, it's not that I strategically withheld the space. It’s more just how I am inclined. I don't think I wrote a poem in the first person until like I was 20 or 21, and I was writing poetry the whole time.

But you know, I also thought it would be helpful to maintain a space that people could step into, a la Claudia withholding the “I” in Citizen. And even in some of the quasi-autobiographical poems in the Deracination section, you know, a lot of those are just fiction. A lot of those didn’t happen or are based very loosely on things that happened. I thought it would be interesting, and that I might be able to get a better handle on what it means to be shaped as a Self constituted by this space of deracination, to create this little avatar instead of having it be me. 

Diamond: Finally, the advantage of reading “Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)” as an ars poetica means that we are also invited to consider the role of the poet and the audience (who my brain translated as artist and the tourist, respectively). You write, “The tourist and the artist can enter each of these containers. / The tourist and the artist can touch the hot button and walk away.” 

I love those lines; moreso, because few of us can enter From From and walk away unscathed–tourist or artist. Your book reminded me of a craft capsule by Will Harris, “Witness vs. Withness,” where he writes that, “It’s impossible to conceive of ‘being’ without ‘being-with.’ 

I think your fourth book forces us to “be-with” the poet and its inhabitants in ways that our passive participation with the poem might miss. I didn’t feel like I could walk away from the hot button of this book.

So, how do you, as artist, create an opportunity to “be-with” your poems’ subjects? and how might the reader, the tourist, enact that same work? 

Monica: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say what sometimes are the subjects of my poems. You can think sometimes of Prince Sado or Pasiphaë as two of those subjects, but part of what I wanted to do was to say, who are these two spectated subjects who are already exoticized, already racialized, and have already been trapped in these containers, in a way that invites them to be spectated by the viewer who was outside of the container, and what do I want to do with that? 

Do I want to be the tour guide who gestures to the box and what's inside it and kind of gets a little wink and makes a little joke? Do I want to be the filmmaker who puts the camera inside the rice chest, with Prince Sado, to spectate his suffering and to spectate his death? And certainly, there are a lot of those films. There are certainly a lot of artworks that cut away the cow around Pasiphaë to reveal her nakedness or whatever. I was not interested in doing any of those things. I wanted to reject those roles. 

But then it was like, okay, so what can we do… because I agree that, to create engagement, to make this not just be at arm’s length… 

You know, you were talking about withholding the “I.” At some point, I decided I needed to put the “I” in the collection. And so, the last poems of the collection, “In the Passive Voice” and “Detail of the Rice Chest” very much have me in it. Because another thing I think about quite a bit with my poet friends is “if you're writing about the Other, how can you do that? What are the ethics of that?” 

And that's going to be different on a case-by-case basis. But for me, it makes me feel like I need to put myself in the same camera frame in which I'm showing this subject, right? This Other. I need to show where I am standing, my positionality with respect to privilege, and privilege can be…You know, the artistic stance itself is privilege, right? You can step out of the container.

My friend, Cathy Park Hong, puts it like, where you are on the topography of privilege with respect to who you're writing about. I was thinking quite a bit about that. 

I was writing a lot about Asian Americans who had been marginalized to a much greater extent than I personally have been marginalized or have been victimized. I was not interested in writing myself as a victim, but I felt like if I withheld myself then I was going to be, like, somehow drawing the mantle of victimhood around me in a way that I was not interested in doing.

And I also thought that it was important for me to put my own complicity, my own culpability, into the picture. What it is that I have done to bolster the walls of this container? What is it that I have done to create walls around my parents? to create walls around people that I know, in order to insulate myself from the same sort of criticisms, the same sort of racialized criticisms that they are subjected to. I thought that by putting myself in the topography—like, “so now you're in the ring. Oh, audience, you're also in the ring. Okay, we're all in the ring!” [laughs] that was how I would ideally like that to happen. To have the audience present as a character in the poem and to have me present as a character in the poem and to have our positions be part of it. 

This is something that theater does often, something that performance art does all the time, but it’s something that poetry has explored less. It's something that really interests me.

About Monica Youn

Monica Youn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently FROM FROM (Graywolf Press 2023), which was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and Best Poetry Book of 2023. Her books have twice been shortlisted for the National Book Award, as well as being finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Voelcker Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. She has also been awarded the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bytter Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship. A former constitutional lawyer, she is a member of the curatorial collective the Racial Imaginary Institute and is a professor of English at UC Irvine.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

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.