Shu-Ling Chua interviews Cham Zhi Yi
‘Food,’ Cham Zhi Yi says in an interview with Dan Hogan, ‘has always been for me a mode of healing, a reminder of trauma, acts of love for the self, and for people around me.’ To share a meal with Zhi, whether in person or through their poetry, is to be moved. Soft-boiled eggs. Ramen in an arcade off Chinatown. Nasi lemak. Lotus root with pork ribs. Post-launch Macca’s. IKEA meatballs. Yong tau fu. Sunday brunch at Barrio.
I met Zhi at the Canberra launch of Voiceworks in 2016; it happened to be the first issue they appeared in and the first I co-edited. I remember their enthusiasm and immediately wanting to be their friend. They expanded my understanding of poetry, introducing me to the works of Ocean Vuong, Jennifer S. Cheng and more. Irreverent yet vulnerable, Zhi’s creative practice defies categorisation. They explore cusps, thresholds, borders/boundaries, and all forms of relationship—familial, romantic, crushes, friendship. Attempts at self-definition reverberate, refract and resurface across their body of work.
In ‘document 2’ (2017), Zhi asserts: ‘i want to ink my / silhouette so i know that within that / continuous dotted line i / belong.’ Years later, during a global pandemic, the speaker of ‘shave head or make banana bread’ (2020) confesses they ‘wish to be held wish / for another’s skin / to define my / own.’ This interview took place in April 2021 as a conversation via Google Docs. It was a joy and honour to revisit Zhi’s early and recent work, including their award-winning chapbook blur by the (Subbed In, 2019). I thank them for their generous responses.
‘What can poetry do for us right now? Can it help? Can it revive us? Can the alchemy of adding poetry to reportage deliver a remedy for the world’s gloomy predicament?’
Another difficult year has come to an end. The dominant mood is overwhelmingly low, as friends, family members, neighbours, colleagues, people on the radio and TV, are all reporting flat-out exhaustion—endless lockdowns, too much screen-time, separation from loved ones, worry about the future. . . We are all probably tired, too, of COVID-19 dominating news coverage, adding to the sensation of being caught in a bizarre rinse- and-repeat cycle. I do feel for the journalists who have had to live with the pandemic in that endless—and relatively unacknowledged—way.
What can poetry do for us right now? Can it help? Can it revive us? Can the alchemy of adding poetry to reportage deliver a remedy for the world’s gloomy predicament?
William Carlos Williams once wrote, in his poem ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower’, that ‘It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.’ He’s telling us that, while we can’t rely on poetry to deliver news bulletins, poems do offer something vital that we would do well to take in equal doses to our daily news consumption. So, what is this vital aspect—or aspects—that can be found in poems?
Matthew Zapruder (drawing on ideas of Wallace Stevens) notes that poetry ‘draw[s] us into a different form of attention and awareness’ than prose, which can aid in the development and preservation of the imagination (Why Poetry, 2017). Further, Philip Metres suggests that the about them turns toward the ineffable. Great poems may confound or delight, teach or provoke—but they are great because their forms vibrate and resonate beyond political platforms, slogans, or formulae.’ Metres recognises that poetry as a form inherently resists the clutches of rhetoric by ‘opening into the possible’ (The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance, 2018).
These arguments about the value of poetry need only be extended slightly to appreciate the value of the ‘reportage’ poem (which we might consider a close relation of the documentary poem). Cultivating skills in creative thinking can assist us in conceiving of new ways in which to act in the world—to not just receive and process the news, for example, but to imagine solutions to the world’s critical problems.
In one of the first essays on documentary poetry (‘The Documentary Poem: A Canadian Genre’), Dorothy Livesay notes ‘a conscious attempt to create a dialectic between the objective facts and the subjective feelings of the poet’ through the writing of such works. This draws attention to another aspect that can make a reportage poem strong, in that we can glean the movement of a mind—as emotionally responsive as the rest of us—navigating the world’s ‘facts’ relayed to us through screen, soundbite, newsprint. Sometimes I wonder how changed the world would be if poetry became the new journalism. There’d be a lot of chaos, perhaps. But I think we’d all become smarter, and more empathetic, too.
Thanks to the extended Rabbit team—Amelia, AJ, Jeanine, Tracy, Zoe and the BSP interns—for their assistance in drawing together another wonderful issue. Special thanks to this issue’s guest poetry co-editors, Kent MacCarter and Micaela Sahhar—you are both brilliant, generous souls of the kind that keeps poetry alive, beating, vital.
This interview originally appeared in Rabbit 34: Reportage.
Shu-Ling Chua: Your poems often unspool from a sense of being miscomprehended, whether wilfully or by accident, by family, friends or lovers. They explore the porous, wobbly boundaries between precision and ambiguity. Where or how does poetry sit in relation to legibility and communication?
Cham Zhi Yi: It’s funny to see you point this out, I think I’ve only recently named my excessive sensitivity to external perception/projection, even though my poems have, for a while now, clocked the feeling of foreignness in others’ perception of me versus my self-perception. I am trying to understand why this sensitivity exists, why so much discomfort sits in any visibility at all, why I care to accurately describe and portray myself when I am so unsure of who that is on any given day.
I am thinking about the Pensieve in the Harry Potter series. I think the question of poetry v legibility for me feels akin to that—the ability to draw from your memory a crystalline moment that an audience can inhabit with exactness. So maybe self-knowledge is imperfect and external perception inaccurate; but with memory swimming in the Pensieve, maybe this gap can be narrowed. Maybe the truth exists somewhere in there.
Through poetry, I feel myself speaking in trying to access that person, whoever they are in the moment. I am trying to parse, from the noise of projection, who I am.
SLC: One of your lines I return to is: ‘i’ve stowed away / four of my five tongues for winter’ in ‘post Solange’. I am haunted by its sense of loss, even as the word ‘stowed’ suggests dormancy and therefore, possibility. What possibilities emerge from multilingual works?
CZY: That is quite a hopeful take on the line. The tongues are now so disused they are all rusty! My work emerges as such because it is, plainly, a more complete embodiment of my selfhood. There are parts of me, parts of the way I converse that are more accurately captured untranslated. When you speak of possibilities, I think that for me means my whole self as one.
SLC: I am curious to know what nourishes you as a person/poet. Food is an obvious path to nourishment, but laughter/humour and astrology also give me, as a person and as a reader of your poems, a sense of contentment and comfort. Food, astrology and humour remind me: ‘It’s okay to be me + I’m okay just the way I am.’
CZY: That is the same thing I want myself to know! Astrology as a framework is adept at capturing imperfections/quirks in personalities that endear people to a particular sign or specific manifestations of a sign (with nuances to placements etc.) which is so easy to make fun of, hence its endless depiction through memes in popular culture. It’s become so reachable to me within my language, almost on par with food, which is one of the most attainable pleasures to me.
There are so many parts to this question, but I think at the core of it, I reach easily for things that give me pleasure/joy in my poetics.
SLC: Your use of space and form pushes against convention in exciting ways. blur by the includes erasure poems, dialogue floats across the page, and one line, ‘today i watch the lining of my uterus exit my body in a single unbroken thread,’ bleeds from where two pages meet. What guides or inspires your experimentation?
CZY: I love that poem so much. I wanted to capture how that felt, sitting on the toilet waiting for the blood to move out of me, taking the time that it takes. I think in that instance, what moved me was the movement itself, blood occupying a space in your body and then exiting; and the idea that I was present to witness it go—hence, the form capturing this movement.
I think I am very vague in language, and my exactness manifests more effectively in movement. It’s like when you try to describe something to someone and you don’t have the words for the exact size/energy of the thing, and you try to draw the shape of it in the air, gesturing wildly. I think I communicate like this often and so must do the same in poems.
SLC: Last year, you performed ‘Anatomy of Fog’, which was published in Rabbit’s Lineages issue, with a new epilogue. You also rewrote ‘soak’ as an interactive Excel spreadsheet poem for Liminal. Through these processes, you unearth and layer new meanings. Why have you chosen to reprise these poems?
CZY: Sometimes, I comb through my archives to see who I was or what I wrote, and my old work surprises me with foreknowledge. These are not works that I have chosen specifically to reprise but are two pieces that have surprised me with a knowing that I was only able to receive months/years after writing them.
Circling back to imperfection in self-knowledge—I cannot know myself until I am willing or have more information. In the first instance of entering these poems, I was without certain knowledge/willingness that I now have acquired. I think I will continue to excavate ‘Anatomy of Fog’. I think I will continue to see selves that have yet to reveal themselves in old poems.
SLC: In ‘be sure we aren’t dreaming’, the speaker suggests, ‘in naming pain / impart ink to tucked away places of this / body.’ Can you speak to the process of learning to love and recognise one’s body?
CZY: I suppose I will start from the beginning—the most consistently I felt vitriol for or discomfort within my body was in my teen years and into my early 20s. A lot of it is because my mother (as a result of societal/cultural expectations) has a projection for a daughter she wants to be moving through the world, and that in turn feeds into my inability to relax into a personhood that I truly am. I felt grafted into a certain form that I was unable to attain let alone retain. For a while in my 20s, as I started working in corporate, I utilised corporate clothing as a template to perform a femininity that is comfortable for my mother. I clung onto the pronoun she/her because, as I once said to a friend, I worked so hard to get here.
I think I needed permission. Permission to relax into myself, even though I don’t quite know who they are if they had the freedom to be. But the point is, I need a space to try, a space to play. In reference to that particular line, I get inked as a means to self-identify a certain manner/emotion. In a sense, recording the moment of alignment to or solidarity with a particular persona on my skin, was freeing for me because it allowed me to register a present that may become past. The definition is not stagnant though the ink is; I am not always this person, but I once was.
I know you are asking about the body, and I am answering about personhood. For me, I suppose, the two feed into each other. I am my body. When I felt myself emerging, my body received my person entirely, and so too was I able to receive my body in the same way.
SLC: In ‘poem i enjoy more than i do him’, the speaker declares, ‘the biggest turn on lies in reciprocity.’ What does reciprocity mean to you?
CZY: What a question! When I wrote this line, I was experiencing such a lack of reciprocity romantically, and if you asked me this then, I would not know. I’m not sure I have such a clear idea now but, I think to start, it requires for you to first know your own needs in order to be able to verbalise them, which then minimises the risk of being inaccurately perceived. To be accurately received by another is such a pleasure and privilege, but to then have your truth be responded to in kind, with similar levels of vulnerability is… it makes me feel brave. I think reciprocity gives way to deep intimacy.
I find that, in romantic relationships, I have been conditioned to operate from a fantastical place, informed by heteronormativity wherein relationships are structured on preconceived expectations that aren’t first communicated and agreed to before being enacted. I am trying to unlearn these patterns, the process of which allows for each of us (my ex-partner and I) and our individual needs within the relationship to come into focus and then be met with precision.
SLC: What are you working on at the moment? How do you hope to see your creative practice grow?
CZY: Ooh, I haven’t been writing too many new poems, but I’ve been writing. I am working with 黑芝麻 on a poetry EP under the duo known as 莎瑜 which is a pun. We met through Wǒ-in-process (Wǒ[我]:, I, me) 找我, a program facilitated by Zora Pang. 找我 brings together artists identifying as Chinese diaspora, and over the period of two or so months, provides the opportunity to skillshare, reflect and investigate their relationships to the Chinese diasporic identity.
The program’s given way to a couple of projects including this EP. In that sense, I’ve sort of been swept along, undirected, which is very typical of how I operate as an artist. I’m quite happy to bounce off ideas with friends and grow into any platform. In that way, I’ve not actually been so much of a poet as I claim to be these days! I suppose I am also half-heartedly playing with old poems on Microsoft Excel and, long term, would quite like to publish a series of these poems one way or another on a digital platform.