Simon Shieh is a poet, essayist, and educator. Simon’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Poetry Daily, Narrative, Shenandoah, and The Missouri Review, among other publications, and was awarded second place in Narrative’s 30 Below Contest. Update: In September, Simon Shieh was named a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.
As RHR co-editor, Judith Lagana tells it, “…one night during the early part of the pandemic, I was up late reading poems online and came upon Simon Shieh’s poem, “Specter,” in the April 2020 Beloit Poetry Journal. After the punch of that one poem, I immediately went to Simon’s website and subsequently read every poem linked there. I found the moments his poetry conjured up really stayed with me. I felt changed by his poetry. ”
RHR is honored to present Simon’s interview.
RHR: How do you determine what makes a poem successful?
SS: Mystery and beauty are two things I look for in a poem, often together, as true beauty is always hidden. It must be said that this logic is at the root of many a misogynist belief—the policing of a woman’s appearance, slut-shaming, any activity designed to “preserve” a woman’s inner “purity” or “beauty.” But I believe poetry offers a way to reclaim a more conscionable notion of beauty, which is to recognize how the misogynist’s assumption of the woman’s “secret inner beauty” is merely an attempt to conceal his own deficiency. And what is the miracle of the poem if not precisely its ability to expose this lack on the side of the gaze—that is, its unique ability to turn its own absence into art? This brings me to the second thing I love in a poem: the tension between white space and language, this characteristic that distinguishes the poem from any other text. With its meaningful use of blank space, poetry allows us to reclaim beauty as a reciprocal mystery, one veil gazing at another, the mystery of the other just a reflection of the mystery of the self.
All that being said, I am an admirer of poetry before I am a poet. I try not to think of a poem as successful or unsuccessful, only as suited to my taste or not.
RHR: Do you believe a poem can be overly crafted?
SS: No, I don’t. I’m sure some of my favorite poems have been thoroughly toiled over. Though I also believe that recent years—with the emergence of the MFA and the general schematization of “craft”—have seen an increasingly obsessive tendency toward an ideal of poetic perfection, as if the enjoyment of writing has to be tempered with the pain of revision. Sometimes I am pleased with a poem after only a few days spent composing it and feel content remembering this excerpt from Aileen Ward’s biography of John Keats: “In a great burst of energy he raced through the last five hundred lines of [Endymion] in seven days and signed the manuscript ‘Burford Bridge, Nov. 28, 1817’ to mark the end. His task was done.”
RHR: Tell us about your writing process.
SS: My writing process has always been somewhat of a mystery to me, which I like. Most of it does not involve writing at all but walking, reading, exercising, experiencing new things, driving, the list is endless, but sitting down to write is more often a process of amalgamating lines I’ve jotted down in my Notes app rather than producing new language. I believe this is because the language of my poems emerges from the unconscious, which follows its own rules.
When I do make time specifically for poems, I always start with reading others’ poems as a way to break away from the logic of prose and the everyday. If I put my phone away, have a solid chunk of time, and am lucky, I will write something.
RHR: Whose name do you invoke at your shrine to poetry?
SS: So many poets opened the doors to my work. Jericho Brown’s The New Testament was my first love, followed by Terrance Hayes’ Lighthead, Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning which continues to floor me, Lucie Brock-Boido’s language never fails to usher me into a poetic headspace, Ocean Vuong whose poetry taught me how to be vulnerable in my work, Louise Glück, James Wright, Bei Dao, Octavio Paz, and many others.
RHR: Does an idea for a poem haunt you or do you hunt for an idea?
SS: Ideas for poems mostly take me by surprise. I rarely (perhaps never) go to the page with an idea, but rather a unit of language or an image. Many of my poems are the result of piecing together language written at completely different times after realizing that they are informed by the same impulse or work off each other somehow. Only then can I begin to start thinking of a unifying idea or theme, but often—and this is what I love about poetry—my poems are united less by an idea than by something more ephemeral, like voice, image, or even impulse.
RHR: How do you arrive at a title for a poem?
SS: Titling my poems always feels forced and contrived, which is to say, I have not found the right way to think about it yet. Recently I’ve tried to move away from thinking of the title as metalanguage and toward thinking of it as an extension of the poem.
RHR: Should writers keep or discard their old notebooks over the years?
SS: Writing on a word processor I feel like I’m burning every letter I leave behind, but I do keep a document full of unused scribblings (and even different versions of poems) that I can return to when I’m at a loss for words. Who is to say which is better, but a writer I admire once told me that the language worth remembering will always come back in another poem.
RHR: How do you know when a poem has reached an end?
SS: I rarely feel like a poem is finished, and when I do, I am usually wrong. Most times I can only step away from a poem gingerly, as if it is a house of cards, and see how it fares. After a few days, months, or years a gust of wind might reveal a weakness in its structure, or I might find something I want to change. Kaveh Akbar in his recent Between the Covers interview talked about an artist who said that he knows a painting is finished when he cannot add anything to it without obscuring it initiating impulse. I don’t necessarily believe that the initiating impulse itself is important, but I do believe that every poem has a distinct energetic field that the poet can either strengthen or hinder by making particular craft decisions.
RHR: Also, we always love every poet's response to this question, so, if you wouldn't mind...notebook paper or computer? Pen or pencil?
SS: Computer. As much as I love the idea of writing with pen on paper (so few distractions!), it’s just what I’m used to at this point. And as I type, I can imagine that I’m playing music on a piano rather than just typing words.
***
Read Simon Shieh’s poem, “Specter,” originally published in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Vol 70, No 2 (2020).
Specter
One night
in Beijing, wasted on cheap
beer, I roamed the half-lit streets
looking for him
Here / every night is the same
I sit down to dinner / with my family
imagine him walking / into the house
wrapping his arm around my neck / in a choke hold
He laughs / mumbles something
that I spend the whole night trying to hear
And on the seventh day
And on the seventh day
And on the seventh day
I look to the stars for direction
but find only poor men searching a dark house
for a lost child, their flashlights
trembling in their hands.
It is not so much
that I think of him, but rather
that only through him
can I think at all
Seen from outside / the shuttered windows of a pulsing house—
dreaming with eyes wide open
And I cannot even speak of desire
that mute silhouette
its mouth full of light
Sometimes, the lost child enters my dreams.
He confesses the sins of his master
as he unravels a spool of red silk from his hands