Hedgie Choi is the author of the poetry collection Salvage, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at UT Austin, and her MFA in fiction from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. She lives in Chicago.
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Hedgie and I first discussed this interview when I was at her apartment a few months ago. Her living room was filled with tiny tomato plants and from time to time during our conversation Hedgie would, seemingly unconsciously, pick up a little spritzer bottle and spritz the young tomatoes. When we met on Zoom to conduct the formal interview, Hedgie showed me her living room, which was now empty of tomato plants—they had been moved to the balcony—and filled with power tools, including a large miter saw. She was using it, she said, to cut up an old pallet to make a planter for the tomatoes. Hedgie and I have had long conversations about poetry ever since we met in graduate school, but this is the first time we talked about her poems as a finished product. In re-reading Salvage for this interview I kept thinking about how her poems treat the world with an almost uncanny openness, and how the result of that openness is sometimes humor, and sometimes something else entirely.
Jackson Holbert: In the fourth poem of the book, “Freaking Out,” you say that “imagery is for losers and sickos.” Do you believe that?
Hedgie Choi: Yes.
JH: Can you say more?
HC: I think there’s something a little perverse about the obsession with imagery in poetry because it is a medium that is not that suited to imagery. That being a great goal of a lot of poetry is always kind of astonishing to me.
JH: The idea that you make something visible through an image. You think that’s . . . fake?
HC: Well, I think that’s perverse. I don’t know if I like or dislike that as a goal. It would make sense to me if someone who made movies was like, oh yeah, it’s all about the images. That is literally all about the images. But why in a verbal medium is there so much obsession with the idea of an image? I understand that it’s not necessarily visual imagery that is being talked about. But still, I think it’s an interesting desire to struggle with the medium. It’s like what can I do with words that’s hard to do with words. So I think it’s for sickos.
JH: There are a few poems in the book where the speaker seems almost mad at the reader. What’s going on there?
HC: I think that having someone be openly angry at you is a very intimate experience. And I also think that a speaker who is, say, only sweet or inviting, is untrustworthy in a way. Anger and suspicion naturally arises as a part of the spectrum of how a person can feel toward another person.
JH: Do you think of the reader as another literal person in those moments? Or do they remain abstract?
HC: I’m not thinking about any particular person that I know, but they’re like a dream person. You know, when you know someone in the dream and then you wake up and you’re like, I don’t know that person.
JH: It’s almost a paranoia.
HC: Yeah. In some poems that ‘wake up’ feeling is included—the speaker is speaking really intimately to the addressee, and then suddenly, it’s like, Who are you? Why are you listening to me? How did you get into my house?
JH: There are a few places in the book where the speaker more or less says that they’re trying to feel things. I’m thinking of Equal and Opposite, in which you say, “Can I say I was moved? / Even if I was the one doing the moving?” and Orchestrated Intent, in which you say, “Say yes, once more, this time, / with feeling. The feeling: hesitation.” Do you think writing a poem can be a way to feel things, a kind of substitute?
HC: I feel often in my life that I don’t feel things as deeply as I should. Which is a funny thing for a poet to say. But even in mundane things, like when I see an email where someone says they’re excited to meet me in person, I’m like, wait, really? Maybe it’s more a problem with literalness than feeling—I might be semantically stricter about the word “excited” than most people are. Or maybe I feel what they feel but I’m less outwardly expressive. Or maybe I really don’t feel what they feel—which is troubling. What if I’m fundamentally a cold and unfeeling kind of person? So I think it’s on the page because it is a big concern of mine.
JH: Yes, it’s a concern of mine too. For you and for me.
HC: Right, it’s an especially big concern if you’re an artist and you are a fundamentally unfeeling person. And maybe some of the poetry is like, okay, I didn’t manage to feel like the right big thing. But what was there instead? So the thinking is trying to find my way toward the feeling.
JH: Yeah. Is it sort of trying to, through the poem, feel what you think you should feel?
HC: No, because I don’t think that’s really possible. I don’t think you can really fake it, you know? But writing the poem gets me through the disappointment or concern that I didn’t feel the right thing, and once I’m beyond that, I can see what was actually there. There’s usually something there, even if it isn’t what I wanted it to be.
JH: That reminds me of the title poem of the book, in which the speaker sees a dead deer and thinks, “that’s exactly what / those // soft and gentle / fuckers // deserve.” It’s something that is felt whether the speaker likes it or not. I think it’s rare in poetry right now for a speaker to showcase negative—and almost socially incorrect—thoughts. What do you want us to think of the speaker in moments of disclosure like that, and do you want the information we get about the speaker in those poems to carry over to the other poems?
HC: Someone asked me recently how much I felt like I was disclosing about myself as the writer in my poems, and I think I said not much, and he said, “Oh, so you don’t hate deer?” It was so funny. And this morning, I was listening to my friend Jody, who has a book out featuring a little dinosaur, and she said she can disclose a lot through the dinosaur that she couldn’t as a person, because people have more tolerance for a dinosaur’s flaws and transgressions. I’m not even offering a dinosaur, all I’ve got is the paper-thin separation of “speaker” and “writer.” But whether or not that separation protects me much, I don’t see this speaker as someone who’s like, beyond the pale, or an exaggeration of moral degeneracy. I do think I have a compulsion to confess something unsavory any time the poem leans toward something beautiful or good—like, remember, it’s not all beauty and goodness over here. And poetry is a place where I can let that compulsion actually happen, as opposed to real life, where confession heavily implies a demand to be absolved by the listener.
JH: I do think there are some poems that don’t necessarily walk back from disclosure, but button themselves up right after something is disclosed. I’m thinking of “Testimony,” in which you say, “How do children survive abuse? / It’s so boring in the end. / I’m a wholly serious person, / but we aren’t in the end yet.” It feels almost like it’s trying to track a thought rather than dive into a subject. Whereas when I think of confessional poetry, for example, it tries to dive into the feeling, to get down the intensity.
HC: Yeah. I wonder if that’s a tracking too, like maybe those poets really do tend to get into it, so that down-the-rabbit-hole focus is what they’re tracking. Whereas what I do, and what I track in the structure of my poem, is the way my mind moves away from a thing, usually. There’s a lot of distraction, and turning-away-from. But of course there’s also a turning-back-toward sometimes—even what you thought of as a detour sometimes brings you right up to the thing you were trying to get away from. I’m really interested in avoidance and resistance.
JH: Going through the book again I realized there are a bunch of poems that deal with in-betweenness in one way or another. In “Mutualism” you say, “not like a parasite / but not like symbiosis either,” in “Affirmations” you say, “Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise / is my boyfriend, or my dad? // What a dangerous and disgusting limbo to be in!” and in “Phases” you say, “I’m half-teenage girls / and half grown men.” What’s up with that?
HC: Yeah, it’s not something that I thought about until you pointed it out. And now I’m like, it’s everywhere. I say something, I walk it back. It’s half this, it’s half that. Isn’t that maybe just the shape of a conversation? Someone says that something and then the other person responds, with some agreement and disagreement, or with some connective tissue but also a differential that moves the conversation forward. The other totally different thought I had about it is: I love when things are 100% something or another. It’s actually my preferred fantasy state. Like, I’m morally pure or I’m evil. I’m a genius or I’m an idiot. Either of those is comforting, actually. But what’s really deeply unpleasant about reality is that it’s never that, things are always in a state of flux, a state of impurity. You might do something genius but it’s not a permanent state. You might do something horrible but you can’t decide you’re evil and get yourself off the hook that way. I’m bothered by the limbo state—I think a lot of people are.
JH: Certainly growing up we have a sense of, this is good, this is bad, and part of the act of becoming an adult is realizing that, uh, things are complicated and you also suck. Do you feel like the title, Salvage, contains this in-betweenness as well?
HC: Absolutely. The state of purity is over if you’re salvaging something. If something’s a little bit marred, I want to throw it out. As soon as a tomato gets a couple yellow leaves, I’m like, let’s chuck that one, let’s chuck the soil it was in, and let’s start over. But that’s doable with tomatoes, not so much with your whole life. Unless you’re going to just die, you’re in a constant state of salvaging.
JH: What you’re saying, despite the downcast tone you are saying it in, seems in some ways really optimistic. Within salvaging there is this implication that there is something to be saved.
HC: Oh, yeah. I am doggedly optimistic. I believe what I have written qualifies as an optimistic and life-affirming sort of book. Pretty humiliating.
JH: There’s a lot of mythology in the book. You call Epimetheus an “OG himbo,” which is probably the first time he’s been called that. At the same time there’s global warming and Elon Musk. Yet it feels like these two live beside each other in your head.
HC: I would say the three big early sets of stories in my life were Korean folktales and biographies, the bible, and Greek mythology, from this amazing comic series that came out in Korea in the nineties and was wildly popular—ask anyone my age who grew up in Korea and they’ll have a pretty solid grasp on who Epimetheus was. The Korean stories aren’t a part of this book much because it hasn’t made its way into the English-speaking-and-writing part of my brain yet, but the second two are obviously big influences in this book, because they’re still fundamental frameworks for thinking about things like global warming and Elon Musk. I think of Epimetheus actually as one of those people that I am envious of, someone who feels deeply and therefore can be easily or instinctively moral. He did an oopsie that introduced misery into the world when he married Pandora, but he’s still, in my mind, a sweetie.
JH: That’s interesting that that would be present in the book then. Not a lot of sweeties in the book.
HC: Maybe it’s telling also that I could only talk about a sweetie in a mythological figure.
JH: Who has to be dead and in fact never existed at all.
HC: Hot take.
JH: There are these other poems in the book that seem to be addressing God. When you say God, do you mean God?
HC: Yes, as in the highest level of metaphor.
JH: Let’s do the horse. In “Last Night,” one of the prose poems in the book, you say “I put the horse by the window because I wanted the world to know what I had done. I was pleased with my work, how I had labored briefly but intensely at something of no value or significance, and I wanted it to be witnessed by others that they might learn something about me and themselves.” Is this how you think about your own poems?
HC: Such a funny question. I think it says a lot about you, Jackson, that you read that part of the poem and thought of it as an ars poetica. But yes, this is how I think about my work 95% of the time. And then 5% of the time I’m like, holy shit, poetry is so important—when I think about what has affected me in my life and what has been powerful to me in my life it’s been books, and that’s what I’m doing now, I’m doing the most powerful thing, oh my God. And then I’m like, oh, don’t think about that. My ambition has to be a secret to myself, because ambition kills playfulness. I feel really free and happy when I think that the work I’m doing affects no one and is useless.
JH: It is, in the end, a poem about making something and then not recognizing it. Which certainly feels like it could apply to poems as well.
HC: Yeah, it becomes its own thing, even though it came out of you. It becomes unrecognizable to you and foreign to you and frightening to you. And I do think that that’s also very much my experience writing, when it goes well.
JH: I think, often, we write poems that are mysterious to us. Either we’re not sure why we wrote them, or we’re not sure what they mean. Are there any poems in the book that are still mysterious to you?
HC: When I was putting together the poems, I think the guiding principle I used was to throw out poems that are no longer mysterious to me. Every poem in the book that has remained still has some element of mystery to me. Not only are individual poems still kind of like mysterious to me, putting together the whole book made them all more mysterious because I was like, I didn’t know I thought about time so much, what’s that about?
JH: Any last thoughts? Any predictions for the coming year?
HC: I predict bees will make a comeback, but not in a way we like.
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