Gathering Intention: An Interview with t. liem about Slows : Twice

Sneha Subramanian Kanta: It has been wonderful to engage with Slows : Twice, t. Your book is a litany, mythmaking, and a nudge towards joy. Would you share the process of writing the collection?

t. liem: I know now that this book is entangled with the beginning of the pandemic. It is a book of not leaving the house, of being obsessed with my neighbors’ noises, of deepening isolation. However, while writing these poems I think I was just trying to figure out how to keep writing poetry, how to keep living, how to find and accept joy. I was also going over the poems I had written the years previous, feeling unsatisfied and embarrassed—it was that feeling you get when you remember something you’ve said, and you cringe a little or a lot. Maybe that’s just what it is to recall moments of vulnerability, or the moments that we should be embarrassed by. I feel both tender towards and embarrassed by many versions of my past self. But at least I can recognize that my cringe indicates some growth. I don’t know. But anyway, in looking for a way out of a rut and out of shame, the idea of a formal structure to acknowledge and harness the stuck-ness emerged. Then the book became the unit to work towards. I let myself re-write the poems I had as an experiment and then the mirroring and repetition became a way to honor past work while also looking forward.

Sneha: The aspect of revision and erasure is central to these poems. In the poem “Someone asks how have you been”, printed gray, “each iteration adds one more word until the thought has accumulated itself singing.” The beginning incompletions are powerful. “There. There is. There is a. There is a lyric. There is a lyric I. There is a lyric I forget. There is a lyric I forget where. There is a lyric I forget where the. There is a lyric I forget where the phrase. There is a lyric I forget where the phrase is.” In what ways is this disobedience important for you when navigating through systemic issues plaguing the world?

t. liem: For me, slowness is a mode that disagrees with capitalistic expectations to be always progressing and productive, to be efficient—but efficient for who? Goodness also sometimes feels attached to doing a lot and to being busy, which is something that serves the wealthy and powerful, those who have the most to gain from us being too busy to think. As a part of this, busyness has been the most effective way for me to hide deep sadness from myself. It is sometimes scary to have too much time to think. This I knew but of course felt it more after being laid off from a shitty job I had barely just gotten in 2020. There was relief and then dread. Since then, I have not figured out a sustainable way to work and feel valuable, but I’m grateful to have time for slow contemplation and where that gets me even if it is unbearable at times. At other times slowness simply makes space for imagination to thrive, for the exciting kind of uncertainty. This is the kind of doubt that leaves me curious. Doubt itself slows time and lets me pay attention to things worthy of poetry. Slowness allows for my own kind of progress and productivity that, for better or worse, is not tied to making money. But also, in many ways, because of my general fatigue, and the exhaustion that comes from being an anxious person, I have no choice but to be slow and live at a kind of low capacity.

Sneha: There is erasure in your poems— the deliberate white space in “Excerpt Of A Longer Work”, for instance. In the first poem on page 30 the lines, “I chalked up my existence to love / and geopolitical circumstances” are fascinating. In the second poem with the same title, there is a musical undertone and repetition. “I was born / Of hyphen of slash of sum // Of sun of sun of sun / Hours hours hours”. There is elemental melancholia. How does the utilization of the unsaid align with the nuances of inquiry and echo?

t. liem: My father felt like he couldn’t or shouldn’t stay in Indonesia when he finished high school. This was around the time of the CIA backed coup of Soekarno in the fall of 1965, and subsequent killings of 1965-66. Although the White Australia policy was no longer official, and although he had done his undergrad there, the immigration process was still discriminatory. He was refused and told that he simply wouldn’t fit in. Instead, he went to Canada where he met my mother. It’s reductive and silly to say that I am the result of a racist immigration policy, of geopolitical circumstances so to speak, but it is also a true sliver of a much bigger story hence the nearly blank page around these lines. I didn’t know this story until recently and my father was prompted to tell it by a news article about anti-Asian racism in Canada during 2020. It was a story that, in our family at least, had gone unsaid and unasked for so long. Sometimes the unsaid looms heavily and it is painful, but sometimes it feels like it would have been painful to ask and to be answered, too. Because of this, for me, the unsaid can then be more like a cloud on a hot, hot day—it provides relief. It can invite something else into the space between us and what we don’t know. The other side of this, though, is the echo: what we do say and repeat and how one can be echoed into the future, how we can be echoes for what came before us that we wish to preserve? This for me is a hopeful question.

Sneha: An intriguing concept you infuse into the collection is the relationality with time. Each poem has a mirror contrary, almost emblematic of the fact that duality exists. The mirroring technique is unorthodox— for me as a reader, this embodies a transcendence. Was this incorporation intentional, and what is the driving factor for you as a writer to include this form?

t. liem: There are two short answers. The first is music. The second is my dedication to the assertion that time is a colonial construct. With music, I like the idea of being able to create the feeling of the refrain—the anticipation and satisfaction of the chorus—or hearing a sample from an old song in a new one. I like the idea of taking something familiar and giving it a new context. I feel like this kind of re-placement also demonstrates how we change in time. Words take on our baggage, they change meaning from our usage, they get reclaimed, they become politically incorrect, they shift as we shift. I also like the idea of creating a sense of deja-vu, like a connection to some other time, maybe a dream time, maybe another life, that sensation that you’ve been here before. For the second part, time being a colonial construct is self-explanatory, no? But really, reading the documents about how standard time was established in Singapore by the British to make their resource extraction more efficient—it literalized this idea in a way that I wanted to explore.

Sneha: For the poems “Slow Mirror” on page 55 and 72, we are meant to look at the inverted text to gather meaning. Your book is a joyful experience for the reader— the speaker of these poems is leading with hope. Apart from the formal excellence, there is a material quality to engaging with these poems, a physicality and action. Would you share how you composed the titular poems?

t. liem: I’m interested in concrete and conceptual poetry, but I want to find a way to write it that feels true to me and these poems are part of that effort. I heard Layli Long Soldier talk about how we read a poem’s layout on the page first, which reminds me of how we “eat with our eyes” before tasting a beautiful plate of food. I like this idea and the possibilities it offers for reading and connecting with whoever is out there looking at these pages, eating them with their eyes!

Sneha: Slows : Twice includes caesura (which is a favorite), prose poems, poems with white space, and an experimentation of form. There is a symmetry in syntax through the distillation of language. How do you achieve this contrast with finesse? What were the inspirations when writing the poems?

t. liem: I mentioned Layli Long Soldier, but I also took cues from Doyali Islam’s heft and the way her double sonnet works; I kept Ocean Vuong’s and Liz Howard’s books nearby as I wrote; the texture of Noor Naga’s prose poems are aspirational for me; Muriel Leung’s book Imagine the Swarm offered me so much form to churn through; Alice Notley’s Certain Magical Acts—I feel like she is known for her syntax and it is truly wondrous. I also read all or most of Linda Gregg’s works and Erica Hunt’s works during this time, but I’ll be reading and returning to all these writers and the ones I’m forgetting to mention, I’m sure, forever. Other writers are always percolating through my brain, and every poem in Slows is indebted to another if not directly then just through osmosis. I’m a very poem for poem poet, truly nothing without a stack of books on my desk and a bunch of open tabs in the browser.

Sneha: What advice would you give to emerging creators? I believe we are all reshaping how one reads and thinks of literature. What changes do you look forward to as a part of the holistic change we seek in Canadian publishing?

t.liem: Always be reading, always be learning. But also, write to the audience who does not make you feel that you must convince them of your humanity or your worthiness. Write as if someone who loves you and understands you is going to read it. Write to the audience who already gets it and go off—edit later! Keep writing into your obsessions and figure out your habits so that you can harness them, so that you can make them one of your superpowers, and then try something new. As for holistic changes to publishing, I suppose, I’m looking—broadly speaking—for representation in all areas. In how we maintain our writing lives, in what we write, and in what is expected or unexpected from us. I’m looking for ten-thousand ways to be a writer of colour, ten-thousand ways to be a poet. I’m a reader more than a writer and I just want everyone who likes literature to be able to find books and ephemera and words that matter to them.

t. liem is the author of Slows: Twice (Coach House 2023), and Obits. (Coach House, 2018), which was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award, and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award as well as the A.M. Klein Prize. Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, vallum, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. They have been living in Montreal / Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.