Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in conversation with Mila Jao Barry and Eunice Lee

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge in conversation with Mila Jao Barry and Eunice Lee

Interview completed May 27, 2024

Mila Jao Barry: Our first question is about a broad scoping view of your work. When I’m reading it, I think it exemplifies the beauty of careful linguistic composition. Different words and linkages feel very intentional. You also mentioned in another interview that being born in China, and specifically, the shift from Chinese to English immersion was part of what made you a poet. We were wondering if you see a connection between the linguistic unity and disunity that catalyzed your poetic interests, and the cosmological unity that your poems are often interested in.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge: I don’t think in terms of disunity with language, rather that juxtapositions can create energy. But I do think this shift from Chinese to English was foundational for my work. My mother tongue is Chinese and I started my linguistic apparatus in Chinese, so when I came to the U.S. at the age of 9 months, I developed a sense of equivalences in meaning between these two languages, equivalents or relationships. I could say I was imprinted by this dynamic. I tend to see everything as relationship. And that is what a metaphor is. Finding equivalences gives me joy in writing. What was the second part of your question?

MJB: I think you kind of addressed it — linguistic unity and cosmological unity and the connection between them. 

MB: Cosmological unity is something I long for and I’ve had an intuition toward it. That shows in my interest in other wisdom cultures and in my living here in northern New Mexico, where I can be close to an everyday experience of being in a place.

Eunice Lee: I think what you just said about being in New Mexico [is] a great segue into our next question. We were also curious about your work alongside Native tribes and indigenous cultures. And in the 1980s, you worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts, where you’ve collaborated with many artists. We were curious if you see any specific cross-pollinations or solidarities between Asian American and Native American poets and poetics.

MB: I’m not sure if I can speak of such a cross-pollination in general, but certainly Native American poets and poetics are sources of my own work. When I finished graduate school at Columbia, I was invited to several multicultural writing conferences where I met Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolfo Anaya, Simon Ortiz, and through him Joy Harjo. I became friends with Ishmael Reed and Frank Chin and Lawson Fusao Inada, and through them I had the privilege to be part of a movement of multicultural writers who, at that time, were not reflected in mainstream publishing. At that time, some people said that my book Summits Move with the Tide was the first book by an Asian American poet to be published in the United States, which is unbelievable, but indicates how few Asian American writers were being published, then.

We bonded because we were so excited by each other’s writing. Here was a river cultures that I did not see in my classes at Columbia. I remember going back to New York and saying I had met people who had “stories to tell,”--what a story is, its richness and profound source. It was a great privilege for me to be part of this moment, and it has continuing influence. Arthur Sze, a Chinese American poet who lives in Santa Fe, also taught at the Institute of American Indian Art for many years. But I don’t know many other Asian American poets who have collaborated with Native American poets and artists.

MJB: Thank you. Our next question is related to multicultural poetics and the multicultural poetics movement that you were just talking about. We were interested in the collaborations that you have [had] throughout the different collections that you’ve published, especially in the 70s and 80s with groups like the Basement Workshop and the Yardbird Collective, etc. We were curious how [they] shaped you as a poet, but also how the multicultural political scene has changed since this period, and if you think that we still are seeing the same levels of  intercultural solidarity and shared galvanizing energy.

MB: I was just in my 20s; to be beginning your writing is already exciting, and to engage in a multicultural artistic community seemed wonderful. After graduate school, I moved to the Bay Area and spent time with the bourgeoning Asian American writing community there, especially with the playwright and novelist, Frank Chin. He was a big, brash leader of Asian American identity and culture and had founded the Asian American Theater Company. His wife, Kathleen Chang, a performance artist, became a close friend. She and I had a lot in common in our families’ histories, and she became an influence for me. In fact, when Frank asked me to write a play for him to direct, I wrote a play about my friendship with Kathleen, One, Two Cups.

I went to New York to work on the play with Frank at the Basement Workshop, an amazing place, the first Asian American cultural center on the East Coast. It was so fluid and open with visual artists and musicians and choreographers and writers, everybody coming in and out and creating with such idealism. Basement Workshop commissioned and produced my play in 1979. Around then the choreographer Theodora Yoshikami asked me if I would work on a dance collaboration with her in which dancers would use my spoken text instead of music. We created a trilogy of dances about water. Theodora’s Morita Dance Company was the first Asian American dance company in the US.

When I start a collaboration, I gather my raw material, words, by reading widely and having many conversations with the artist I am collaborating with. For the first dance with Theodora, I read a Japanese fairy tale about a little boy who lives underwater. I read scientific books about oceans and ocean floors. I make this stockpile of raw material, like a playroom. The playroom is like a recessive space for the other artist to come into and talk to me about their vision, and I try to embrace that vision with words.

Ishmael Reed was the editor and publisher of Yardbird Reader, and the publisher of many, many multicultural books during this period. I learned a great deal from his originality, curatorial brilliance and iconoclasm.

EL: Beautiful. Thank you and that’s perfect, because we also have a question about your plays, which you mentioned. In One, Two Cups and in your later play Kindness, I was really struck by the kind of communication that happens. The characters share a telepathic intimacy. That reminds me of the empathy that I read in your poems. I was curious if you could say more about the writing process for the plays: whether they were similar to your poetic processes, and what it was like staging these plays?

MB: Yes, writing the plays was similar to my collaborative process. In One, Two Cups, I started with a theme: the heritage that Kathleen Chang and I shared. I don’t know if you know Kathleen’s history? When her marriage to Frank ended, she moved to Philadelphia and became Kathy Change. She continued her performance art as a kind of beautiful ecstatic, and she also became involved in political causes such as the rights of sex workers and world peace. I think she was a beloved eccentric around the University of Pennsylvania. But eventually the intensity of her feelings caught up with her and she immolated herself on the UPenn campus for the cause of peace. A cult has grown up around her since then. We shared a history; our families came from Beijing and had similar educated and reformist backgrounds. I could see that high minded reformist spark in Kathleen, and it was part of my love for her; the intimacy and formlessness of trauma became the atmosphere of my play.

Kindness I wrote with Richard Tuttle, my husband, who created the visuals and it was produced in Santa Fe in the early 1990’s. The composer Tan Dun created the music with the great opera singer Shi Zhen Chen. I was thinking about kindness and animism, as if kindness could become a living being. It was inspired by the optimism and love I felt because of my marriage, our daughter, and the creative worlds that were opening for me. We received only one review in which the critic said, he went outside in the middle of the performance and yelled at the stars because he didn’t understand anything!

They’re both poet’s plays, so the integrity of the language had primacy over whatever dramatic or psychological alchemy happens in a more conventional play.

MJB: Thank you for sharing all of those personal stories, it’s very meaningful. Our next question is in reference to a particular poem from your first collection, called “The Old Know by Midsummer”. In that poem you write, “I want to be the man and the woman / and the child and the elder.” When I read that, I thought that it foreshadowed the simultaneity that exists in a lot of your more recent books. It made me wonder if you see your younger self as grasping at a truth that has become clearer over time, or if you even think about the evolution of your work linearly? Or if you return to read your work at all?

MB: Yes, I view my work as linear in development, an opening outward or forward. It’s interesting how one can be born with certain intentions like seeds.

I don’t really look back on that work. I try to stay in the present or the future. As I grow older, there is so much experience behind me, so many memories, I feel I could get lost in the past. The past is protean in how one thing can seem significant in the context of my looking and then another thing.

EL: Since we’re on the note of time and space and dimensionality, we were also curious about the dimensions within your poems. I’m thinking of the poem “The Star Field,” where you say: “Outside is the field she is thinking about, a category of gray dots / on a television screen, of star data, representing no one’s experience, / but which thrills all who gaze on it.” What is this field? Where is the star field? And how would you describe the x-, y-, and z-axes of your poem [or] your poetic universe, if that makes sense?

MB: I guess the star field is like an aura or a feeling. It’s certainly dynamic. I want to create a philosophy where love has credibility, in which the cosmos has an interconnectedness that is equivalent to, or the same as love. I’ve read that the heart has as many neurons as the brain, so, a thought can also be like a feeling. I’m rewarded if I write in a direction my heart likes by a subtle positive feeling like a sparkle. That’s how I try to find these axes of dimensions or multiplicities or equivalences. The star field is from my intuition, but I develop the intuition by attending to my heart’s signals as I explore different ideas and directions. If I start to go in a negative direction, I can feel my heart shrink.

You might know that I like books that channel other voices. There are many wonderful books in which the author channels the voice of the Pleiades. The Pleiadean Agenda, which I’m reading now talks about the divine source as generosity.

MJB: A lot of readers of your work, including some of our friends or colleagues who love poetics, often say that it’s abstracted. But talking to you, and reading things you’ve said about writing, [your work] always seems just so grounded in real life and real relationships. We were wondering if you have any advice for readers who might need help bridging that cognitive gap, or for those who get lost in the complexity of language or of metaphor? 

MB: I think to read my work musically as well as cognitively is one route into my poetry. And also, listening to me read outloud. I think sometimes a poem's meaning can be parsed by my phrasing. I also hope that my voice has a sincerity that helps the reader to be more open to what can seem dense at first. Abstraction varies. Some abstractions flow like music, and some abstractions are a way to achieve meaning or feeling that cannot be expressed otherwise, as in painting. Sometimes a poem I write that seems complex becomes transparent years later.

MJB: At the beginning of your answer, you said that scientific concepts or metaphors are important for you to get to like that place. What is that place, exactly? Is it a source of creativity?

MB: In the mind, in creativity, I believe there’s a kind of magic: one element can go next to another, then magic, energy, happens. It may be an emotion, feeling, experience or revelation. I often use scientific or philosophical concepts as building blocks for this magic of metaphor. I try to achieve a fluidity between conceptual and emotional language and imagery, where the polarity, such as between a scientific concept and an emotion, becomes a continuum.

EL: I want to ask you a question about the way you put things together, and [about] what you said earlier about musicality. When I read your poems, they make rhythmic sense to me, and I’m thinking of poems like “DJ Frogs,” where you specifically channel sounds from nature. I’m curious about your process of creating rhythm and musicality in your poems — is there a trick? 

MB: My sense of musicality, I think, is innate. My father had a wonderful ear and played classical and jazz records at home. (I believe the sense of structure in my poems is influenced by classical music forms, sonata, concerto, etc.) For me, musicality, prosody and rhythm are arrived at unconsciously, and a lot of my process involves opening to my unconscious. I use my natural sense of music or rhythm to make the raw material of a poem into something intelligible. Sometimes I have to work on a phrase for a long time to get the music right.

MJB: I think, with that, we’re moving out of our more technical questions and into things we’re just really curious about. Do you have a favorite constellation, and why? If you don’t, why not?

MB: Of course, The Pleiades, because of their beautiful voice in the channeled books I have read and their ephemeral presence in the night sky. Also, Richard and I once visited an archeological site, Chavín de Huántar in the high mountains of Peru. The people who had lived there were very involved with The Pleiades. There was a stone basin in the middle of a courtyard that filled with rainwater and reflected The Pleiades at certain times of the year. The power of that site still inspires me.

And I have to say Orion, because it is so easy to see. It provides a touchstone of time and place in the evening.

EL: We’re also curious about star beings. Have you ever met a star being? What is the relationship between your star beings and Leslie Marmon Silko’s? And how can I meet one?

MB: The Laguna Pueblo writer, Leslie Silko painted a mural in downtown Tucson of Star Beings, and that may have been my introduction. Then when I started to research visitors from the stars, I saw that many cultures around the world described Star Beings, including American UFO mythologies.

Often there’s a person in your life who does not fit in — their energy does not have the same outline as their physical outline. There is some mystery and oddness that could be physical or stylistic, a way of dressing. If you say, “Oh, that person comes from the stars,” it makes sense to you. You probably already know such a person. I’m thinking now of a curator of poetry readings in New York who seems like that. Olivia, our pet snake, was a visitor from the stars. Once a psychic told us this, we knew it was true.

Our disconnected scientific/cultural image of a star is as a massive conglomeration of data and mathematical formulas of combustion, chemistry, astrophysics, etc. A star according to many people is a home for Star Beings, and that shows me there are multiple realities at the same time.

MJB: What you just said — about these magics and systems of organization that transcend our understanding — helps me understand something unique in your work, which is the humanization of scientific language. I think you capture the human element that sometimes gets lost in more technical texts. 

MB: I guess the analytic, materialist ways of gaining knowledge are transitioning to other ways of learning, including myth, energy and quantum paradigms.

MJB: Speaking of learning, we were wondering if you have any reading, art, or music recommendations for young poets, writers, and artists.

MB: I recommend recent poetry books of Anthony Cody, Nathalie Diaz, Simone White, Elizabeth Willis and forthcoming novels by by Ken Chen and Claudia Rankine.

MJB: Things that you encountered when you were young that inspired you to write are also definitely valid answers.

MB: What influenced me very early were translations of Sappho and César Vallejo. Sappho for the intimacy, and Vallejo for the refraction. Then Shakespeare’s sonnets, for the structure, and Rilke for extension. Translations of LiPo and Tu Fu were models of unifying nature with philosophy. John Ashbery opened out prosody for me.

EL: We’re also curious what you’re reading and getting inspiration from today. What brings you joy, and what gets your poems started these days?

MB: I’ve been writing about plants. I’m trying to make a connection between growth and possibility, possibility in our future. I’ve been researching Critical Plant Studies, especially authors from Australia and New Zealand. I’ve also used Goethe’s The Metamorphosis of Plants and Michael Marder’s Thinking Like a Plant and also books about shamanic practice in the Peruvian rainforest.

MJB: You mentioned that you’ve been writing about plants, and this broader idea about topics standing in for a sense of longing, connection, or catharsis. But if you’re willing to tell us more about your current project and what inspired it, we would really appreciate that.

MB: I started writing about plants a few years ago, inspired by a wonderful book by Pam Montgomery, Plant Spirit Healing about communicating with plants. Some of these poems are included in Hello the Roses.

Later, in Peru, Richard and I went by riverboat to the Madre de Dios National Park, 2 million square miles of rainforest. The richness of plants and animals there inspired my idea of a “green fractal,” which is a dimension or structure of interconnectedness as a generative matrix.

After the physical traumas of COVID in 2020, I wrote the poem “Thinking the Way a Plant Grows”, in which thoughts are non-centered, distributed and branching out like a plant.

I researched old trees and visited primeval forests in the Pacific Northwest. The experience of thousands of years of interwoven growth deeply affected me and I’m trying to express that ecology.

EL: Your work seems inspired, but not bound up by, specific events, contexts, or voices. How can poetry both speak towards real world concerns, but also transcend what’s happening around us? How does your work relate to the rest of the world we live in?

MB: A leaf is intimate with its environment, with air, rain and sunlight. It takes in these elements and transforms them into the energy and materials needed for it to grow. I use the image of leaves opening one after another along a stem as an example of taking in the world and using the energy from the world to grow and to nourish others. The energy of growing represents possibility to me. There is always possibility in the sacred future.

Thank you, Eunice and Mila for this conversation.

About Mei-mei Berssenbrugge

Born in Beijing, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge is the author of fourteen books of poetry including Hello, the Roses, Empathy, I Love Artists and A Treatise on Stars shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her collaborations include works in theater, dance, music, and the visual arts.  She is the recipient of the Bollingen Prize for poetry and lives in northern New Mexico.

Eunice Lee (she/her) is a poet, researcher, and translator of Korean literature into English. She is the translator of Syncopation by Kim Sono (ASIA, 2024), and her work has appeared in Honey Literary, The Margins, The Shore, Asymptote, Circumference, and more. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Harvard University. (Instagram: @eunice.y.lee)

Mila Jao Barry (she/they) is a poet, hand-cut printmaker, and fourth year English student at Harvard College. Her poems have appeared in The Harvard Advocate, Pigeon Pages, and more. Her debut chapbook, a tribute to novelist Qiu Miaojin entitled the Wenzhou Street Sonnets, is forthcoming from Raptor Press in February 2025. (Instagram: @_milabarry)