If I were to choose one principle that guided me while writing my first full-length poetry collection, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), it would be Italo Calvino’s notion of “lightness.” This might seem odd, since many of the poems in the book were written amid a time of escalating crises. In our moment, the idea of lightness can feel almost absurd, even irresponsible.
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino celebrates “lightness” not as frivolity or escape, but as a particular kind of mental agility. To practice lightness, he says, is to practice “the subtraction of weight” from reality—a way of reimagining the world not as fixed, but as fluid and mutable. He finds this quality in both myth and science: in myth, a person can turn into a plant or animal; in science, a solid is a swarm of particles, endlessly reconfigurable. Seen through the lens of lightness, the physical world becomes not as rigid or relentless as it appears, but a field of potential. Lightness isn’t about tone—it’s about our desire to be untethered from what we already have: the way the mind can roam, leap, and transform.
Poets practice lightness on the smallest scale: language. Take simile, for example. “Like” or “as” can soften the outline of a fixed reality, like dunking a slice of old baguette in water. As soon as A is compared to B, the physical presence of A is no longer final—we can now entertain the possibility of A becoming more like B. In fiction, such transformation needs a slow build-up: Apollo first falls in love with Daphne, then chases her, which causes her to turn into a laurel tree. In poetry, a simile can be transformative in an instant, as Wordsworth writes in one of his sonnets:
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration…
At first, the simile seems unsurprising because it’s tautological: this beautiful evening is quiet and holy, and it’s like a nun, who is also quiet and holy. But after the pause created by the line break, the holy time quickly shifts from calm to ecstatic as we discover the nun “breathless with adoration.”
While simile lightens the weight of reality by suggesting its transformative possibility, it isn’t declarative—which is what endears me to simile over metaphor. Metaphor asserts A is B; simile concedes A is not exactly B, but is like B. It’s a concession that feels human—it expresses a desire yet to be realized. Leafing through my book, I can see how often I turn to simile to create surprise and enact transformation: “my toes wiggle, pupa-like,” “cooling my feet on a crystal ball like a psychic out of business,” “all windows lit, except two—they huddle, like a pair of dreaming panthers,” “I followed him everywhere like a son.” In the last example, my speaker wishes he were the other man’s son, but he isn’t. The desire for intimacy is suggested, but remains out of reach. The simile becomes not just a comparison, but a mark of longing.
In poetry, lightness isn’t only a matter of language. It also has to do with how lightly and freely poets engage with source material. One poem in my book, “Death in Parentheses,” features two characters: a speaker drawn from Japanese folklore and a man returned from war. Their relationship spans many years—beginning with intimacy, growing distant, ending in loss. The speaker follows the man, wants to be close to him. Eventually, the man goes senile and dies, while the speaker remains unchanged and alone. All of this is fictional. And yet it is also the story of my grandfather and me.
I was close to him as a child, but then became distant as I grew older. I was studying abroad when he died, and could not attend his funeral. He never spoke of the war, except once, when he mentioned stepping on a landmine. As a result, one of his legs was a little shorter than the other, though I could never tell. Near the end of his life, he reportedly held the hand of my aunt and said, “Come back alive,” perhaps reliving a friend’s departure to the battlefield. These fragments, these realities, were repurposed for the poem. Reimagining our relationship as a friendship across time helped me overcome my reserve and allowed me to imagine what it might have been like if we had stayed close. The liberties I took with biographical fact—a persona, repurposed memories—express my regret and longing for the one who is irreversibly gone.
The weight I was subtracting here was the weight of autobiography. There is, of course, a contemporary fascination with poets’ lives. Our backgrounds, our cultural and personal histories, are seen as vital context. And they are. But I also want to believe that I am more than a list of these facts, that I could be someone slightly different on the page. Today, the poet’s voice is often equated with the speaker, thanks in part to social media, public readings, and the increasing visibility of writers as performers. I feel the pull of this. I enjoy meeting other poets, sharing work aloud, building community. But another part of me—a quieter, more private self—wants to preserve the separation between my voice and the voices in my poems. To borrow Calvino’s language again: I want to subtract the weight of my biographical self so I can be free to imagine, to invent speakers and situations the way fiction writers do. Writing and rewriting becomes a way of collapsing time and space, drawing from various sources—including memory, daily observations, historical facts, folklore, imagined narratives—and transforming them into a work of art.
In my mind, the most light-footed genre of all—the one that most freely leaps through time and space—is film. Directors can cut from one moment to another with total disregard for temporal continuity. Consider Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. Chiron begins as a small ten-year-old boy in Miami. Toward the end of the film, he’s in his mid-twenties, now a muscular drug dealer. He reunites with his childhood friend, the only man he’s ever loved. In the final sequence, we see Chiron rest his head on the friend’s shoulder as his armor falls away. The film could have ended there, with an image of love, trust, and vulnerability. But instead, it makes one final leap, cutting to a scene with Chiron as a child standing alone on the beach, his back to us, his slim body lit by moonlight. Then he turns to the camera.
In life, we cannot return to childhood. But the film moves lightly in time and space, from interior to exterior, from adulthood back to childhood. That final cut gives us a glimpse of who Chiron was before the world hardened him. It also suggests that his life could have been different, and perhaps could still be.
I’m not sure if such an abrupt shift to the past would be as convincing in poetry, and that may have to do with a fundamental difference between the two genres. Film is deeply immersive, thanks to its visual and auditory immediacy. We’ve all felt this immersion in a movie theater, where we become completely absorbed, as if we were dreaming together. A cinematic apple comes with all its sensory richness, ready to be savored by the audience, whereas a-p-p-l-e is a sequence of letters that relies on our patient, readerly collaboration to become real.
But perhaps this is also poetry’s strength: as a verbal art, poetry can acknowledge that what we read and write is a figment of the imagination. Poets dream, but they dream lucidly. In many of my poems, I imagine myself speaking to the dead, but I’m aware that it’s all fiction: there is no real flashback of the face I long to see, no sound of the voice I long to hear. The moment we begin to confuse dreams with reality, we risk falling into escapism or sentimentality.
Lightness affirms the human capacity to dream—to be not this, but that—with eyes fully open to the presence of a reality that resists our dreaming. To subtract weight from the world is not to escape it, but to release the capacity to dream what doesn’t exist yet rather than staying content with what’s given. It is to believe that I don’t have to remain fixed in this version of myself, and that the world, too, could be different. It is to insist on the possibility of an elsewhere.
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