Ally Ang is a gaysian poet & editor based in Seattle. Their work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, The Seattle Met, and elsewhere. Ally is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and MacDowell Fellow. Their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, is out from Alice James Books this month. They co-host Other People’s Poems, a poetry open mic and reading series in Seattle. Find them at allysonang.com or @TheOceanIsGay.
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In 2022, I had the privilege of being in the Jack Straw Writers cohort with Ally Ang. In addition to getting to know their poems, I got to know Ally as well. They were funny, whip-smart, and always encouraging of their fellow writers. I’ve admired their being and their writing ever since.
Jory Mickelson: Thanks so much for agreeing to have this conversation. I am excited to talk to you about your book. I couldn’t help but notice your poem “Risk Assessment” has its own little interview or interrogation of the speaker. It opens:
Where did you come from?
I have spent / the currency of my body / clawing
my way out / of the blood-dark dirt /
that birthed me /
With this in mind, can you tell me the places this book finds its origins?
Ally Ang: I believe the earliest poem in the book was written in 2017, although most of them were written during my MFA program from 2019-2021. My MFA thesis was rough, but it laid the foundation for what would eventually become Let the Moon Wobble. Since it was written largely during the early days of the pandemic, it dealt with isolation, grief, fear, and rage towards the systems that seemed hell-bent on ushering in multiple apocalypses in the name of capitalism and white supremacy. At the time, it felt nearly impossible to access joy or hope amidst the despair, and that was reflected in the writing—it was a pretty bleak manuscript. In later versions, I made room for more humor and pleasure in the book, which I think was very necessary.
Since its early days as my thesis, the book went through somewhere between 10 and 100 revisions before I turned in the final version. Nothing ever truly feels “finished” to me; I could’ve kept revising it forever if no one had stopped me. I’ve changed drastically as a writer and a person since I began working on this book; I have very different relationships to language and to myself and my identities now. Some of the newest poems in the book were written as recently as last year, and I feel the different versions of myself butting up against each other when I read the book. But I’m trying to allow all of them to speak.
JM: Allowing all of them / all of you to speak! It is always interesting for me to look back across a manuscript of work—I tend to be a slow writer—and see what changes are happening to me and also to my language. Sometimes it can feel cyclical or as if I am returning to things again and again at a slightly different level.
I want to talk to you about the moon. In reading Let the Moon Wobble, I was stunned by how often the moon appears in your work. I did a count, and the word appears more than 50 times! Your collection reminds me of Jean Toomer’s poem, “Beehive”:
“Within this black hive to-night
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
But in your case, I would replace bees with poems. “Poems escaping the moon, / Poems returning through the moon . . .” What is it about the moon and you?
AA: Wow, I had no idea the moon appears so many times in the book! That’s funny and also a little embarrassing. Like most ~sensitive~ gays, I’ve been obsessed with the moon and the ocean and their lovership since I was a kid. I grew up on the shoreline and as a teenager, I would spend many nights sitting or walking along the beach, listening to the waves and staring at the moon while reveling in my angst and yearning. The moon has always been close to my heart—figuratively and even literally, as I have a tattoo of the moon on my sternum.
A lot of poets think of the moon as a tired, overused image, and they’re not wrong—it’s a huge cliché. In “My Adventures as a Social Poet,” Langston Hughes writes, “I have never known the police of any country to show an interest in lyric poetry as such. But when poems stop talking about the moon and begin to mention poverty, trade unions, color lines, and colonies, somebody tells the police.” The moon becomes shorthand for so-called “apolitical” nature poetry, unthreatening to systems of power. But of course, there is nothing apolitical about nature or nature poetry—I think of Tiana Clark’s I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, Tommy Pico’s Nature Poem, and Hanif Abdurraqib’s series “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This” as a few of many examples of contemporary poets of color complicating the notion of nature poetry and its relationship to race, colonialism, and white supremacy. The moon is certainly political; there are literally American flags planted up there.
Though I wouldn’t consider myself a nature poet, the moon wobble feels like an apt representation of that tension between the poetics of nature and social issues that Hughes refers to in his essay: a natural phenomenon compounded by capitalism-driven climate change that will likely have devastating effects. I hope that even in the more lighthearted moon-related moments that appear in the book, that complexity is still present.
JM: Don’t be embarrassed about the moon! In my first book, Wilderness//Kingdom, I have so many birds in my poems that I wrote a poem in my second book titled, “Another Bird At the End of An Elegy,” to sort of mock my own avian obsession.
Reflecting on the poets and the issues you mention, it feels like there is so much to be said at the present moment. One way we can say it is through our poems. One of yours in the collection, “You Deserve the World,” manages to get so much of the world into it. The poem surprises and delights me with its turns of phrase and line breaks. It opens:
During this latest shiny new catastrophe,
while I lie in bed and luxuriate in the silk
of my sadness, a friend’s text lights up
my screen: You deserve the world. Not
this world, hostile and unkind, but the one
we are building in the lines of poems . . .
My question for you is, what kind of world are you building right now amid the endless stream of catastrophes (environmental, political, socioeconomic, ethical, etc.) we find ourselves in?
AA: At the risk of sounding unbearably earnest and idealistic, I envision a world in which everyone has what they need materially and psychologically to thrive; power and wealth are not hoarded but equitably distributed; communities are equipped to address harm without relying on carceral systems; the needs of living beings (including humans, animals, and the environment) are prioritized over the demands of capitalism; white supremacy, colonialism, anti-Blackness, Zionism, homophobia, and transphobia, and other forms of violence and oppression have ended; and all people have achieved liberation and self-determination. I can’t say that I am single-handedly working to make all of these things happen, but I hope that my poetry affirms that we deserve and can dream of better for ourselves than the world we currently inhabit without being too didactic about it.
One of the most wonderful things about poetry is that it isn’t limited to the logic of other genres or areas of life—poetry doesn’t have to adhere to what’s realistic under our current system. Years ago, I read a poem by Franny Choi called “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History,” which takes place at some unspecified point in the future in which prisons and police no longer exist, and follows a group of children taking a school field trip to a museum exhibit about our current carceral system; they’re horrified and frightened by the brutality of their past, our present. That poem unlocked so much possibility in terms of my own abolitionist thinking and my poetics. I aspire to offer that to others in my own writing.
JM: Abolition isn’t just for institutions, it’s for ideas as well. However, your poems aren’t just about ideas or dreams or possibilities. Your poem “You Deserve the World” continues with the lines, “a miracle, this body, how it has already begun / to heal before I’ve even registered / the hurt . . .”
Your poems are so deeply embodied. While the speakers in your poems dream, I would say that your poems are deeply incarnational. They embody or manifest the ideas and concepts the speakers proclaim in concrete and tangible ways in the poems: a tomato, cat hair on flannel, a lizard tongue, cheeks that ache from smiling.
Have you always been a sensualist? And how do your own experiences of embodiment in the world enter into your work?
AA: I have always felt quite disconnected from my body, both because of dysphoria and because of the reality of existing in a racialized and gendered body and how people interact with and project onto it. I would be much happier if I could just exist as a disembodied mist of consciousness. I feel like I should have grown out of being ashamed of my body by now, but the truth is that I haven’t.
Because I am normally so disconnected from my body, I challenge myself to really be present with/in my body as I write. In my poetry, I try not to shy away from the shame, grotesqueness, and pain of inhabiting a body, while also leaning into the immense joy and pleasure that embodiment offers. Being queer and trans and having close relationships with other queer and trans people has shown me so much possibility and taught me that I have more agency over my body and my pleasure than I once thought. My body is something that I am constantly creating and revising, just like my poems.
JM: Thank you for your honesty. As a transgender person and someone living with a chronic illness, I have really struggled to love, well not love, but embrace my body nonetheless. It was joyful for me to discuss my trauma at going to the urologist with another trans friend recently. They confirmed my feelings and experience of dysphoria.
Perhaps for many trans people, this feels obvious. But I live in a smaller city and it has been challenging to make and maintain friendships with other trans and gender-nonconforming folx who are local. It’s easy to dismiss my own perceptions and feelings without other queer people, especially trans folx to reflect them back to me. This is why community is so vital for me.
Can you tell me about your experience with communities and networks around your writing?
AA: I feel very lucky to have found and created many rich and supportive communities around writing over the years—from my days as a baby poet reading on the open mics at EMW Bookstore and the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, to spaces in Seattle like my MFA program and the Jack Straw Writers Program. There have been so many other groups and spaces along the way that have nurtured me as a poet and a community member, like the Tin House Summer Workshop, MacDowell, the Dreamyard Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium Fellowship, In Surreal Life, Yanyi’s intensive manuscript workshop through One World Books, classes I’ve taken at Hugo House and Grubstreet, my colleagues at Game Over Books and Youth Speaks Seattle and Poetry Northwest, and more. I’ve met some of my closest writer friends through these spaces.
Last year, my dear friend Cody Stetzel and I began a new reading series in Seattle called Other People’s Poems, in which the main constraint is that everyone must read poems written by other people. Each month, we have an open mic, and we also invite three featured readers to read and collectively nerd out over our favorite poems and poets. It’s blossomed into a beautiful reader-centered community hosted at Open Books, an independent poetry-only bookstore in Seattle. Getting to do this series is so special because I basically get to gather my favorite writers in Seattle and hear them read and talk about the poets they’ve learned with and from. We create a kind of communal living anthology every month. It’s very fun and it’s connected me with so many brilliant writers in the Seattle area!
JM: I think giving back either as an editor or reader to a literary journal, offering free or cheap writing workshops, and hosting reading series are great ways to foster community. I know many of the connections I have made with folx over the years have come through others’ efforts in doing these things. I am currently a guest reader for a trans-centered lit magazine and the experience has been great. Not only can I help the editor bring a new issue out, but I am getting to read a wide variety of great poems by young and emerging authors. It makes me grateful and sends me back to the page in my own writing.
One question I always ask other writers is: What are you reading right now? What are you listening to? What are you watching?
AA: I’m back in my fiction-reading era—I’m currently reading Unsex Me Here by Aurora Mattia, The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong, and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. All three of those books are so gorgeously written; they’re forcing me to appreciate and luxuriate in the beauty of sentences, which as a poet is something I often forget about because I’m mostly paying attention to the line and the line break.
Films I’ve enjoyed recently include Sorry, Baby (2025), All That Jazz (1979), and Wild at Heart (1990). And I’ve been listening to Indigo De Souza’s new album Precipice, Yaeji’s album With a Hammer, and the cast recording of the recent revival of Sunset Boulevard with Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond. I am, unfortunately, a big musical theater gay.
JM: We’ve talked about the origins of your forthcoming book, and some of the poems in it. We’ve also talked about the people and organizations that have kept you writing. But we haven’t discussed you being a 2023 NEA Arts Fellow yet. Can we talk a little about that? Did winning an NEA create new opportunities or open new doors for you and your writing?
Also, looking back on it now, what are your thoughts, in light of the current administration rolling back NEA funding and adding what essentially comes down to censorship for future applicants?
AA: I’m immensely grateful to have been an NEA Fellow. The money was life-changing, the fellowship connected me to some wonderful writers, and the institutional recognition came at a pivotal time in my writing life. That being said, even in 2023 when I got the award, I was like, “If the federal government approves of my poetry then I must be doing something wrong.” Ideally, my poetry should threaten the American empire, not be endorsed by it, so if it’s palatable enough to be federally funded then that reflects poorly on my poetics. If I were a more principled person, I probably wouldn’t have applied at all, but the truth is that I wanted and needed the money and the NEA is one of the few sources of significant funding for early-career writers. Of course, the people who select NEA fellows are artists and writers themselves, not government officials—many of the writers on the NEA selection panel the year I was chosen are writers whom I admire immensely and whose values and politics are aligned with mine. Still, I felt ambivalent about it then and feel even more so now.
The Trump administration’s gutting of the NEA was devastating for so many writers, artists, publishers, and literary and arts organizations. The loss of NEA funding was a crushing blow to my publisher, Alice James Books, and to so many other small presses that are publishing vital work by marginalized writers. There are so few sources of monetary support for writers, and losing NEA funding creates even more scarcity within a discipline that is already devalued by capitalism.
The past two years of US-funded genocide in Palestine and the rise of fascism have illuminated so much rot that is endemic to this nation. Personally, it’s left me feeling incredibly jaded about every institution—including non-profits, academia, and the literary establishment—many of which are unwilling to even say “genocide” or “Palestine.” But I’ve also learned that these institutions need us more than we need them. It is our resources, support, and intellectual labor that make these institutions what they are, and we can and should hold them accountable and demand they do better.
The last thing I will say is that slashing NEA funding and censoring writers is part of an organized cultural strategy by the Right to try to eradicate all forms of otherness. The cultural warfare against trans people, people of color, and all marginalized people can sometimes be overshadowed by the legislative attacks upon these groups, but it’s all connected. We wouldn’t have the current anti-trans legislation without years of biased, inflammatory, and inaccurate coverage of trans people in The New York Times, for example. Culture and art play a huge role in manufacturing consent for genocide and fascism and denying the humanity of certain groups of people.
As poets, we are also cultural workers, and the very least we can do is use any platform and capital we have to resist the dominant narratives that are killing our people.
I’m grateful to be connected to you in this poetic ecosystem we share. I’ll close with an invitation to support the Sameer Project, Workshops for Gaza, Crips for eSims for Gaza, and other groups and individuals working to provide vital aid to Palestinians.
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