A Conversation with Janelle Tan '18
Interviewed by Julia Falkner ‘19
When did you start writing?
I’ve been writing my whole life, I don’t really think I ever started writing. My life has been about trying to become a working writer. Since I was seven or eight, when I realized that “writer” was something you could do for a profession, every single day in my life has been with the single-minded goal of trying to be a working writer.
What about poetry first drew you?
Two years before coming to college, I completely stopped writing anything creative, and sometime around then I discovered Plath. I read a lot of poetry, Plath was the gateway into that, and suddenly everything I read, I was like, “I want to do more things like that…”. It was almost like I had no patience for fiction anymore. So by the time I started writing again at the end of my first year, that was everything that came out was a poem in some way, because by that point, everything was coming to me in images. And it was coming to me in metaphor. A lot of my strongest work is narrative in a certain way, and it’s because I feel all along I’ve been creating this narrative, but now I’ve been telling it through metaphor.
Poetry was the perfect length, it seemed to be the most crystallized essence of a thought. It felt, to me, like you could say more in a poem with fewer words, in a more elegant way. To me, that was almost more powerful than fiction… how much could you say in a smaller space? Some of the images I was reading in poems I had never seen before, in any work of fiction. I like how poetry is the most pure, playful form of language. More so than prose, it is the essence of language, almost an elevated form, but not really. Anyone can understand it, and there are poems in us. It’s just a matter of getting to that.
You write using a speaker that’s been described as “kind of a banshee”. Where does she come from?
This is funny: I was using the print room and someone had printed out a poem, called “Dead Girl’s Love Poem”, and it was based off Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song”. I wrote this villanelle based on “Mad Girl’s Love Song Too”, because it’s just, like, the best villanelle. I had this image coming back to me of a banshee braying, I put that into the poem, and then I wasn’t quite sure if the image worked or not. So I asked Ellen [Dore Watson], “do you think the banshee works here”, and she said, “no, I think the speaker in your poems is a bit of a banshee, and I mean that in the best possible way.” That has kind of stuck. In some poems there’s a lot of blood and gore, and it seems like this crazy unhinged woman. It comes across as this wild, reckless forthright… almost a Bellatrix-like figure. I feel that’s the only way I know how to write, in this kind of Bellatrix-like fashion. That does sound make the speaker sound like a banshee in some ways. I would have to ask Ellen whether she still thinks so!
Are you ever afraid to make bold or graphic choices in your work, or does it come naturally to you?
Over the summer there was a poem I wrote called “Houseguest” and there was this one image, “men rolling her pubes between their fingers, and she bleeds all over them”. One of my best friends –– he’s my first and best editor, he’s been reading my work since I was seventeen –– he was like, “ew, this is disgusting”. I was like “stop it”! Haha, but I can see how there’s an “ew” moment there. In a lot of my earlier stuff, there’s a lot of blood and a lot of… like… human discharge. Lately I’ve been talking about other things, trying to find new ways to say things, but I feel like a lot of it is still very graphic and crazy and out there.
Do you worry about whether or not it will be considered autobiographical?
It scares me sometimes because I feel like people who are very close to me are not shocked by my work, but it’s a weird introduction. When you’re a poet, you never know whether the speaker is the purest version of yourself, or the version of yourself you would like to be… the speaker’s relationship with your personal self is just a big thing. How similar are you to the poet to you the speaker? What if someday somebody gets to know me by reading my work and then meets me and is like, “oh, you’re actually really normal”?
My speaker represents a very full, distilled version of me, but exaggerated. A me that can can only exist within the world of these poems, never the real world, because the person that exists in my poems could never survive. They would have no friends, no relationship with anything. But it’s a very stylized, heightened, idealized part of me. You know how when you’re reading someone’s work you inhabit their world, a fully formed world that could only belong to them, and all their poems come from the same world? I feel like the world I have is kind of a banshee figure or a highly sexualized Sylvia Plath… that’s the world I try to inhabit in my poems.
It seems like Plath really informs you.
I think Plath is always in my life, and always hangs on my work where I least intend her to be. Like, when you have a crush on somebody or something, and all the roads in the world lead back to this person? I feel in a way, that’s me with Plath. Everything I do is unconsciously Plath-esque or in her shadow or something like that. No matter what I’ve done at Smith, everything comes back to her. She’s probably my biggest influence.
Any other writers?
The start of whatever I’m writing seems to come from what I’m reading at the time. Everything I read now is poetry, basically. But I’ve also been reading a lot of the lyric essay, Maggie Nelson and Anne Carson’s lyric essays, and that has also changed the way I’ve been writing a little bit. It’s kind of a journey. When Maya Jansen had her Q&A at the poetry center, she talked about different poets being kind of medication, so I’m trying to think of it that way… there was a period where I was reading a lot of Chen Chen, and I realized I was getting a bit too narrative so I reread Ocean Vuong’s book [Night Sky with Exit Wounds] again, and that kind of solved that problem. Ocean is one of my very big influences now. There was a time when I caught in this very abstract narrative, not really unfolding the images enough; and then I picked up Jessica Jacobs’ chapbook [In Whatever Light Left to Us] and that solved the problem. Also Marilyn Chin. I picked up her Rhapsody in Plain Yellow and it seemed to be a slightly more plain-spoken version of what I was going for.
Those are the books that influence me right now. That answer might change in six months when I pick up a different set of books.
Could you talk a little about your honors thesis?
It’s poetry, and there’s a section at the end that’s a critical essay. My honors director was telling me to think of it as Anne Carson-esque, like a personal intellectual essay. The way I pitch it to people now is based on something my friend put on his blog in January, it’s how I opened the critical section. There are two kinds of high school intellectuals, or early college intellectuals: one who picks up Orientalism by Edward Said and one who picks up a Nietzsche anthology.” And my question to that was, “Why can’t someone be both?” That’s the elevator pitch.
When I started, I envisioned the project to be about representing my voice as part of the POC canon. There’s this quote by Ocean Vuong, “only now are we beginning to see some kind of real lineage”. I was also challenging the canon at Smith to me, this white canon. There’s something about how there’s a direct line between Milton to Adrienne Rich or a direct line from Shakespeare to Terrance Hayes, Ellen Doré Watson calls it a “white man’s toolbox”. Using my intersecting identities as a POC foreigner who’s mentally atypical, how do I navigate that white man’s toolbox? That’s what I’ve started with.
But now it’s an exploration of all my different selves. It’s a picture of me this year. The writing is dredging up dead bodies from the lake, I’m kind of pulling up all these past selves and my current self, negotiating those. Although the original goals are still there, it’s been less consciously about navigating the white man’s canon, and been more like an investigation of myself. There’s a critical half to it, inserting the theory: that’s the second half I’m working on now, seeing how these poems pull together. There’s a lot that my work fits into, a lot interweaving, even if I’m not even consciously doing it. There is an order to the poems even though it’s not the original emotional chronology I imagined.
What’s next, once it’s complete?
I don’t want it to just sit on ScholarWorks, it’s almost a waste to have all this work and have it just sit. I want it to be seen by people. The work begs to be read, not just my book but everyone’s poems in general. It shouldn’t be sitting in a computer, it should be out there in the world somehow.
You’ll also graduate with a philosophy major. What is your relationship to philosophy as a poet?
It’s given me a lot of frameworks to think about the world that are different. The inquiry isn’t the same thing as a poem’s inquiry… in a lot of poems, they question the world through this lens of an “I”. It’s always filtered through the “I”, the individual, the speaker. Whereas in philosophy, you’re throwing questions into the space, coming up with answers, engaging in conversations. In a way that’s also what a poem is, but you’re entering the self, and in philosophy you need to remove the self, you need to ask things universally.
I think of philosophy as my framework of looking at the world, and poetry’s how I express it. They’re both leading me to a place to ask questions of myself and the world and relationships. I don’t see them as separate fields, because to me it’s just a way of interrogating the world. I think a lot of my preoccupations are philosophical in nature, a lot of my work has described as kind of metaphysical. A lot of what I’m trying to do is put the two together. To ask both questions related to “I” and relationship to the world, but also how we the world as a whole functions. Good poetry, to me, asks from the same things from the world that philosophy does. And good philosophy asks from the world the same things that poetry does.
depression as a long drag
by Janelle Tan
the way they talk about depression
lifting makes it sound like resurfacing
into daylight, the inevitable gasp
for breath after thrashing wildly
underwater.
on the first day after four months lying
catatonic under the covers and imagining
bare trees curling their knobby fingers
around my throat, i expected to meet
sprayed speckles of light with a moan.
i expected it to feel more like emerging
headfirst from birth canal and into oxygen.
instead, i dragged a hospital-issue comb
through my matted hair and wrestled
with jeans that used to fit.
after watching multiple cats
freeze into taxidermy from my window,
stepping out the door and into warmth
felt more like dredging my body from a riverbed,
sputtering and barely breathing.