To Love an Artist is a poetry collection as broad as Herodotus’ Histories and as deep as the variegated forms deftly utilized by Hsiung allow. It looks to the meaning of engaging with language as a English-language worker, in thinking about muscle memory, machine memory, and land memory through an examination of geography, archeology, history, and politics.

Tiffany Troy: How does the opening of To Love an Artist set up the reader for what is to follow? What fascinated me right from the start is how the prose form, as Vijay Seshadri points out, allows for more breadth and depth of thought. You also begin in a world where myth, reality, and history are melded together. As you were putting together the collection, what were some of the thoughts behind the opening?

Valerie Hsiung: The first parts of this book that were written were the middle section (after “My mother worked at a desk. My father worked at a desk…” and before “In the black box…”). But at the time of their writing I didn’t know they were going to be a part of this book because really they’re leftovers gleaned from The only name we can call it now is not its only name, a book that’s coming out with Counterpath in 2023. The only name we can call it now is not its only name just rejected these leftover bits, but I couldn’t let these crumbs go for some reason, like I sensed something there that I hadn’t dug enough into, and so I brought them to an empty table and started writing around them. That’s how To love an artist started, as a writing-around-a-table-scattered-with-some-crumbs process.

The first piece that came from this writing-around process was “Language from bronze…,” which happens to now open up the book. How that sets up, as you ask, the reader to enter the portal is that it begins in a modality of engaging with language as a way of probing and inspecting and being a kind of human metal detector.

I was situating myself in geology, history, and archaeology, but the more I unfurled this scroll, and the more I probed far and vast, I noticed this language, maybe the language of reality, this language of scientific inquiry, laced with so much coercion, you know, especially for someone embodied the way that you and me are embodied yet who speaks English, or who has to navigate in the world of English. I was finding things in reality, and I was also finding these metal deposits in my body. It was like the speaker was finding an embodiment of the voice that they were locating in themselves, in their environment, and in their place in history. So maybe that’s the place of myth that you speak of, the myth of the human self which situates between land memory and body memory and machine memory, and the realization that my body doesn’t just belong to me.

This wild idea—of course it doesn’t belong to me alone because of the coerced nature of the world we’re working with. Maybe that’s also the pressure of myth, too. That my body also belongs to myth in this way.

Tiffany Troy: To me, your collection reflects that deep probing. What you just spoke of, about earth memory, body memory, and machine memory and how that functions in connection with language reminds me of this moment in your book when you write: “Singing, I learned early on, is also a type of muscle memory. Even without any bit of natural talent, one could become practiced enough until one was able to attack most pieces of music vocally, as long as the piece were transposed for one’s own unique vocal range. Over time, the most foreign of sounds, whole spoken languages, can feel natural in the mouth.”

That passage allowed me to understand repetition in your collection much better, how it’s connected with language itself. Take the English language, for instance, and how muscle memory and machine memory can work together in a way to make us forget the earth in some senses.

Valerie Hsiung: Repeating something enough times can be its own kind of a curse, a curse which you can maybe only break by taking the repetition to its tipping point, by expropriating the curse-imposed coercion and dispossessing it as a self-imposed coercion, until the curse is just wholly absorbed into your body. The root of the curse-binding phrase could also be the root of the curse-unbinding phrase.

It’s interesting that you bring up the “In the black box…” piece, because of the whole collection, it seems like that section is in some ways the least tactile one.

Recently I’ve been returning to the writings of Simone Weil, and one of the things she wrote now helps me to better understand what is happening in this collection. She wrote something about how when two friends reunite after being away from each other for a long time, and they shake hands, they nearly don’t even experience pleasure or pain, not the way you or I normally would when shaking hands with or touching someone, and she compares this to the way a blind person senses things through their walking stick. They sense the thing they’re touching so directly that it actually bypasses touch. In the “In the black box…” section, it feels to me also like there’s a mechanism of bypassing tactile transmission by using the intermediary, like the end of a walking stick, to sense and probe even more directly. Something’s unnatural until it feels totally natural. Or something’s unnatural until we realize something was taken from us.

Tiffany Troy: Can you describe a little bit more about the process of writing the book?

Valerie Hsiung: To go back a bit to how it began, with those leftover poems, the middle pieces, that I’d carried over from The only name we can call it now is not its only name… With that collection I had arrived at this form that was not intended, it was listened to. The way I might describe it is as a tectonic form: you have these more concrete-like blocks of prose, and then every now and then a jagged fault line of verse, cliff-like, appears, and then as suddenly as it appeared, the fault line disappears, so it’s sort of this counter-cartographic back and forth between fissure and concrete, concrete and fissure. This tectonic form that was carried over from The only name we can call it now is not it sonly name tothe beginning of To love the artist mirrors the probing.

In 2019, which is when the bulk of this book was written, I wrote the “Language from Bronze…” section, the “In the black box” section, and then the last “Hallelujah” section within a couple of weeks of each other. They all probe and inspect, you know, and have this way of, I use the term, being human metal detectors, because it did just feel like I was opening myself to uncertainty, but also this intuition that something was there, the way one might wait for something in the ground.

With the second section of the book, “My mother worked at a desk. My father worked at a desk…,” I very clearly remember this soft gaze coming over, especially compared to the first piece, where I feel like it begins with such a hard focus, like mhmm, I am searching for something through a tunnel, I am on the hunt. Whereas with the second piece, the process was very much more similar to the way they say Buddha meditated, not closing the eyes completely, but closing the eyes just so with just a little sliver, so that I was partially turned inward, but still somehow open to my surroundings. That piece immediately began with this ritual opening ceremony of words: “My mother worked at a desk. My father worked at a desk…”

This ceremony locates itself in a somewhat symbolic but also literal configuration of my family history. My matrilineal family did own desks, or so the story goes. It’s a literal truth, but my experience of language is that the more you repeat something, it gets subsumed into a place of tone and atmosphere and abstraction, too. I was interested in where that led me. I think it opened up a space where I was looking at things in my past, but I was also, as you said, constructing a myth of and for elsewhere simultaneously.

What could I as a person caught between so many communities and meanings and languages become? What could we become?

Not that there’s any solution set out in this book, and I’ve never been interested in language of solutions, but it was about marking that experience of being partially turned inward, but also continuously opening my antennas to my immediate surroundings, and that was a sort of measure that would allow me to not be affixed to the past, but not be affixed in the present, either. And to open the writing to a mode of becoming.

Tiffany Troy: How does the different forms—the tectonic concrete-fissure form, the place of tone enabled by the Buddhist-mantra-like repetition, and the prose sections—serve the probing in the collection?

Valerie Hsiung: That’s something I can never articulate as I’m in the midst of a writing. If I were in such control otherwise, I probably wouldn’t write at all. But I guess a quest requires allowing things to shape-shift if that’s what they want to do, if that’s what the feeling is.

Looking back, for example, at “My mother worked at a desk. My father worked at a desk…” I think the plasma-like quality goes hand-in-hand with loosening the language to go deeper in a performance of more intimately stratified probing of more phenomenological things. Unfolding this writing from a place of direct experience just made it more plasma-like and writing in this more plasma-like way made the writing correlate direct experience with imagined experience. And that’s where a lot of the probing in this section lives, between the actual and the hypothetical. I’m interested in when an utterance is issued hypothetically but the hypothetical nature of the utterance is as impure as they come. When an utterance is issued hypothetically as a way to save oneself from one’s actual desires. And when the hypothetical ceases to be a test.

Differently, with the “In the black box…” piece, the feeling that guided the writing was a quest to live in a space where I’m considering the poem as a failed game, and that living, to me, makes the writing take on the form of a particular substance. Because I was interested in the idea of a failed game, with that came the possibilities and implications of a stage, a game as a boxing match. So the box form was not just any container, it was also the box that a board game arrives in, but it was also an arena, where a fight is staged. It started as one line, a one-line consideration. And then one line became two. And then suddenly I had one block and to me that block appeared as a box. And then that process continued and I started also thinking of the box formations as these giant shipping containers. The quest of the line seemed to call forth these arenas, containers, boxes.

When does the puzzle become a conflict? When does the conflict dissolve into a puzzle? When does the goal of an innocent, benign game become a more lethal or menacing strategy, a strategy of war, and how do all of these benefit each other and sort of give each other shared language? So the language in the “In the black box” section work, too, as pieces of a game. It is a probing itself of the rules of a game in which it is both participant and game-keeper.

If “In the black box” is a container, “My mother worked at a desk. My father worked at a desk…” could be the liquid that leaks through it.

Tiffany Troy: Right! If you think about it, there are rules of life, and the rules of capitalism which you examine in the collection. You deftly utilize the forms to examine topics that concern the poet as well as the world.

Like Renee Gladman who wrote the introduction to your collection, I was just struck by how visually the poems appear on the page, too, and what poetry can become and do in its different forms.

Is there anything else you want to add to what themes or motifs the forms allow?

Valerie Hsiung: There is a continuous movement in the first piece between a language that has to contend with the language of correctness and answering, the language of provability, and something else that trusts the ineffable—ineffable like the space that exists between two people lying together on the bathroom floor, searching for a cure. Eventually the language of inquiry deliquesces into an incantation of this search, which extends the unanswerability of the inquiry.

In “My mother worked at a desk. My father worked at a desk…,” the plasma-like form and the soft gaze allows another kind of torque, I think, between this idea of introspection or the way that language allows us to inspect within ourselves, and so to address a kind of deep negligence of effacement, but on the other side of that coin, facing another negligence—the negligence that occurs when we turn away from the world.

We need to introspect in order to be aware of the person standing at the bus stop, to see them, to be alive to the anonymous person. There’s a real fear in the language of that piece, the plasma language that’s floating between probing inwards and that peripheral foreboding of what am I neglecting, what am I missing?

With the final piece of the book, I was thinking about how language accompanies us as we walk in the streets, as we work in this grassroots way, but also quite literally, how language accompanies us as we walk in the street with a friend, having a conversation, how our bodies walk on these sometimes parallel, often colliding lines, and one of us pressing into the other, and the other moving too close into traffic and pressing you back into your line, and you both trying to maintain a parallel trajectory, and it’s not easy.

Looking back on “In the black box…”, I think partially because of that game mind, I fear sometimes that that piece didn’t knead through the importance of setting a metaphysical foundation for why our work with language has to come before our work with each other as political communities. It’s not that it’s something that maybe helps or that doesn’t hurt. I believe it comes always before (and yes, during and after).

If we can’t agree that the word “migrant” means something fundamentally different for different people, then why would we feel it necessary to talk about the entangled meaning of the word “migrant”? We wouldn’t and that’s why we’re bound to say things that permit and even encourage commonplace and extraordinary violence.

Tiffany Troy: I was just thinking of how in your collection, the word “version” is reiterated as “virgin.” How like you said there’s this critical need to work on language and to think about what language implicates, because language defines, and that definition of who has what right is the rules of the game in terms of who can participate, who are the subjects and objects. It’s something I never really thought very carefully about.

Valerie Hsiung: Well, with the “In the black box…” section, it was almost inevitable because I was interested in this construct of language as a game, where one could argue, because the rules, even as they are actively being set out, almost seem fated to be set the way they are, randomly fated, that it’s a closed system. In a way that sort of inevitably is going to lead us to a place where we’re going to be trapped. What does it mean to trap myself in this game I’ve written? I’d hope that I did trap myself, but sometimes I worry I actually got out somehow right at the very end and mostly unscathed. Now the one who was almost trapped is out to get the game keeper—I’m out to get me!

Tiffany Troy: I feel that the questions raised by the book, that are probed by the poet, fully conveys the sense of being trapped. That process of probing—since it is not the poet’s intention to resolve questions but to illuminate its implications—is the seed to future poems, with fingers crossed.

Do you have any closing thoughts you want to share for your readers?

Valerie Hsiung: People have asked me about the title. The title signifies, very broadly, the implications, and the porosity and the threats, and the confusion of being a language worker, at its base level. And again, I don’t think the book is setting out to offer any solutions or finality. But it’s a space for the confusion and the porosity, and the threats and the implications to extend into each other.

In thematizing this book, which has no individual chapter piece titles, the main book title becomes heavier because it’s the only frame to read the book with, unless, as with this book, the frame is so wide that it’s almost an invisible frame in a way. And so, then I ask myself, What’s the point of starting a book off that way? Well, you begin in this, um, void this sort of bio-magnetic void and that’s where the first piece does begin and does seek to not establish a home, but to work in that space of indefiniteness.

That was something that I wanted to offer to myself.

Tiffany Troy: I am a huge fan of Herodotus’s Histories, and I almost felt as if there’s basically, no one like in terms of the vastness, and the tales being told. I really felt that desire to excavate and probe, so I’m so grateful to you.

Valerie Hsiung: “I am bound to tell what I am told, but not to believe it.” Thank you, Tiffany.

*

Valerie Hsiung is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and the author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections, including The only name we can call it now is not its only name (Counterpath, forthcoming 2023), To love an artist (Essay Press, 2022), selected by Renee Gladman for the 2021 Essay Press Book Prize, outside voices, please (CSU), selected for the 2019 CSU Open Book Prize, Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), and e f g (Action Books). Her writing has appeared in print (Annulet, BathHouse Journal, The Believer, Chicago Review, digital vestiges, New Delta Review), in flesh (Treefort Music Festival, Common Area Maintenance, The Poetry Project), in sound waves (Montez Press Radio, Hyle Greece), and other forms of particulate matter. Her work has been supported by Foundation for Contemporary Arts, PEN America, Lighthouse Works, and public streets and trails she has walked on and hummed along for years. Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives in the mountains of Colorado where she teaches as Assistant Professor of Creative Writing & Poetics at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (forthcoming, BlazeVox) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the Women in Translation project at the University of Wisconsin. Her reviews and interviews of emerging and established voices are published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Laurel Review, EcoTheo Review, Rain Taxi, New World Writing, Hong Kong Review of Books and Tupelo Quarterly, where she is Managing Editor.