Wendy Xu is a poet and writer, and assistant professor of writing at The New School in NYC. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including The Past (2021) and Phrasis (2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by The New York Times Book Review, and a book of essays entitled Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds: Form, Futurity, and Documentary Desire (2025). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Conjunctions, and widely elsewhere. Born in Shandong, China, in 1987, she lives in Brooklyn.
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Zachary Pace: What impressed me the most about your new book, Your Historical Loveliness Knows No Bounds, is that the essays both define a strong ethics and describe those ethics in action. Was this one of your motivations in bringing the essays together—to convey both the theory and practice of an ethics?
Wendy Xu: I’m glad it comes through that only in the application of an ethics—bringing it to bear on actual things, even the seemingly banal—can all its theoretical complexity amount to anything. As for motivations for bringing these essays together . . . part of my fantasy for writing is that if I could just find a place for all these ideas to go, one that’s comfortable, caring, ethically oriented, then I could move on from them. I had that fantasy about this book: I thought, if I put together all these ideas about documentation, form, absence, poetry, living . . . living, period . . . but they’ve come back into my conversations and my thinking stronger, which, to the credit of the ideas, means they’re still so interesting to me.
ZP: In the book’s closing essay, you speak to the profundity of reading banal experience like a text in order to write it—observing that your students “discover their agency to connect literary techniques to the enormous ideas and frustrations (such as surveillance, or income equality) that previously felt too omnipresent to tackle.” This strikes me as entirely true to your reading and writing practice as well.
WX: Poetry, for me, makes things small enough that I can deal with them. I can’t deal with the enormous, essential, conceptual problems of our day. I can’t deal with capital-S “surveillance”; I can’t deal with capital-C “capitalism”—like . . . “empire,” you know? I can’t. . . . But poetry becomes this place where, through technique and through ethical orientation, I see how those enormous things play out in my life in the first place, and then I feel like I can deal with them.
ZP: Capital-S “surveillance” is a major concern in these essays. You write so powerfully: “The efficacy of surveillance as an element of statecraft hinges on [. . .] paranoia in order for surveilled subjects to police themselves, having no way to rationally determine what punishments might be visited upon them for what actions.” I feel this tension everywhere nowadays, but especially on the internet.
WX: How we think about surveillance is changing all the time, because the apparatuses around us are changing so quickly: what life itself is mediated by. I feel I can’t keep up. One of the fantasies that I feel like I’ve been sold is that technology—specifically, what corporations would call “friendly surveillance”—will make me more legible: to myself, to other people. It will somehow inscrutably lead to self-knowledge, social knowledge, community knowledge. But it obviously doesn’t. It’s an insane lie.
But certainly it’s different for people my students’ age. When we talk about these ideas together, which some of the book thinks about, I’m drawing on my own experience as a person in my late thirties, and I’m so aware of what I’m not aware of, in terms of what “living in a mediated way” looks like when you’re nineteen. My students are often teaching me what it feels like to be made legible against their own consent, to be fragmented and parceled by technology. I remember a kind of “before,” where young people today might not.
ZP: Many examples of the application of your ethics occur in the classroom. You’re an extraordinarily gifted teacher. Being a poet and being a teacher go hand in hand for most of our friends and mentors, too.
WX: Totally. The poet seems like a natural teacher because a poet—at least in my experience—is someone who wants to be with other people: someone who maybe writes poetry alone, sure, but ultimately really, really wants poetry to be a road that leads to others. I mean, I do think that’s where teaching starts—as a desire to be with others, in study, in contribution, in mutual curiosity, in sharing. In my poetry classes, half the time we’re just old-fashioned sharing. Sharing is good pedagogy. Listening to other people—and practicing how to respond to other people sharing with you—is a life skill.
Poetry and teaching have been tied up for me for a long time, and at some point, they became financially tied up: I make a living teaching. But even if I didn’t, I would need to bring myself as a poet into the classroom-form, which is also the community-form, and I call it that not to romanticize it, just to distill it into its most essential quality. I’d still be sharing poetry with other people. I mean that in a very earnest way. If it’s just me with my delicious ideas, that’s sad. It’s also boring. It’s sad and boring.
ZP: Such a crucial part of education takes place just being and behaving together in the classroom. My personality became a sort of patchwork of my favorite teachers. Their phrasing and even their mannerisms remain so prominent in my affect.
WX: Mine, too. Such gratitude to the ones who first take you seriously, before trying to give you any knowledge or craft information. The first ones who didn’t laugh when you or I said to them, “I’m a writer.” A lot of this new book is about my dad, and I think it comes through in these essays that he was certainly my first teacher. He was that first person who didn’t laugh, who took me seriously. I would write stories when I was a kid, and he would print them out and make covers with wallpaper samples from the hardware store. He’d staple them together and write “Xu Family Publishing” on the back.
ZP: Your father’s identity as an academic seems foundational to your understanding of him.
WX: I knew him as a grad student who wore big Coke-bottle glasses, and 90 percent of his personality was going to a campus, studying, talking about science, trying to figure stuff out. Being someone who trades in learning is something I understood about him, even among all the things I didn’t.
ZP: You have your own scientific awareness—which is also a deeply poetic sensibility—of the chemicals in the water and air that we now know are composing our bodies: “You remind yourself that it’s no longer forever chemicals ‘in’ our hair, or ‘on’ our skin and food, forever chemicals are our hair, nails, skin, blood.”
WX: As a writer, I retroactively see these connections. In the moment, I’m just coming across this information, and I’m not thinking yet about what on Earth it has to do with writing. The stitching together—seeing that it’s a metaphor, seeing how one piece of information helps me understand the other—is the retrospective work of writing. If it seems like those connections are being made in the moment, then that’s something that the writing is doing well.
I feel sensitive environmentally—to small changes in atmosphere, mood, tone, social organization, weather, diction. The modern dilemma is no longer something like “I’m over here and those other substances, those pollutants, are somewhere over there.” Now, it’s “I am the other substances”; it’s an existential and literal reorganization of self. This corporeal body-barrier is no longer real. My blood, my hair, my eyes . . . whatever blood rushes to a part of my body to heal it when it’s cut, that rush contains PFAS, PFOS, accumulated microplastics. This stuff keeps me up at night.
ZP: It seems analogous to your ideas about fandom, especially in sports, where the fan is one part of a larger organism in which all parts share the victories and defeats. Sports fandom de-centers corporeal individuality in a way that’s not unlike how you’re talking about chemicals de-centering our sense of bodily autonomy. But of course, sports fandom is optimistic—and related to solidarity.
WX: I’m still trying to figure out this exact connection. Politically, I’m against individuation, as I think we all should be. The understanding that “I affect you and you affect me” also encompasses “you will suffer the way that I will suffer.” We’re yoked together.
I watch a lot of basketball as a microcosmic experience of a collective, brought together for a focused goal for a focused period of time. Try telling a fan that they don’t contribute or affect the game! We contribute by shouting at our televisions and by being disgusting and never washing our jerseys. To me, it’s a way of practicing investment and participation, creating stakes that may not have any material consequence in the moment. I have to think there’s some application of practicing these emotional stakes when it comes to the solidarities that are most important. Look at the campus encampments two years ago. Anti-individuation practice in action.
ZP: The campus encampments showed us people who were willing to give up their individual victories like jobs and degrees because they couldn’t imagine a collective future if they remained “complicit”—a word I use with caution. You write brilliantly: “the buzzword-ification of ‘complicity’ threatens to render every soul found ‘complicit’ immediately politically inert, disqualified from future solidarities, slotted into yet another devastatingly American binary of innocent and complicit.” I think this is a radical redefinition of complicity.
WX: I’m glad that it spoke to you. Yes, I’m skeptical of “complicit” as a designation if it only begets inertia—if its subtext is “you can’t aspire to be anything more.” And thank god that’s not what we hear in the student movements. There, the subtext has always been the obvious: If silence is complicity, then speak. Speak and move forward.
I think the understanding of complicity as a moral or ethical way station is important though—one that sharpens action. This can happen in poetry, too. It seems like a life’s work: emotionally and ethically litigating through poetry the questions of, “Where is my complicity? What do I do with it? How big or small is it? Where does it come from?” The work that precedes getting into a room with other people to talk about what’s next materially.
ZP: When did solidarity first occur to you?
WX: I’m not sure when. But I do know that only as an adult did I understand so clearly that my family’s earliest days in this country were only possible because of other people’s willingness to treat us as deserving of material help and assistance and solidarity, simply because we were a part of what I now will refer to as a New York Chinese-American diaspora of the early 1990s. At the time, you’re just living it. At the time, you’re helpless in so many ways that you don’t understand—and in the ways that the country doesn’t understand you and your language—you’re living and dying on other people’s willingness to extend solidarity and collectivity to you. I understand that now, but as a kid that didn’t occur to me.
ZP: You describe the healing work you’ve done through Internal Family Systems therapy, which is another positive example of de-centering the self as a single identity: It encourages a person to think of their psyche as containing many individuals or “family members” at once.
WX: When I started doing IFS, I found it confusing. But of course it’s confusing: Society says, “You are you.” It would be weird to feel naturally collective instead of individual. But now it informs every part of how I see and do life. For me, it’s so useful, because it says to us that inside, we’re struggling the same good struggle that we’re struggling outside. Me and you and everybody else who wants the Earth to live on, for everybody to be resourced, for wealth disparity to be toppled, for Palestine to be free—we’re just trying to get to know each other so that maybe we can have an experience of radical action and radical solidarity. With IFS, on the inside, you’re a lot of people and they’re doing what people do: They argue with one another, they disagree, sometimes they make up, they build relationships together, they contribute their unique skills to a cause. I remember my therapist was always so clear that the point of this work was not just to get to know yourself better. The point of the work was to practice a kind of collectivity so you could apply it to everything.
I’m someone who really wants to be in service to other people. IFS is such good practice for having the spaciousness inside to show up for other people. Because if you can’t show up for other people, what is the point of all this?
ZP: But of course you’ve got to show up for yourself first. Now I’m thinking of my very favorite passage in the book: “I believe my mother wanted badly to be my mother, and thus poured most of her life’s energy into me and it’s this innate embarrassment, this desire she couldn’t escape to mother, that courses through me, and which I feel acutely, when I am writing, when I am trying very hard to mother myself.” How long have you been aware of the connection between writing and reparenting yourself?
WX: It became more obvious to me after I did IFS work, maybe because reparenting or re-experiencing difficult experiences from childhood is part of that work. I would like to think that the two have always felt related. Not to take away the nuances from parenting a literal child, but writing has its own intensities that overlap with how I think about care and providing it. I’m not sure who is “giving” care and who is receiving it when I write, or where those subjectivities are even located, but that’s part of what makes it interesting to me. My parents did their best to make me feel safe enough to grow up in America, but neither their nor my safety could be secured by love alone. Writing lets me revisit some of their love’s efforts.
ZP: And before writing, reading allowed us to parent ourselves when our parents weren’t available.
WX: Absolutely. Books parented me as much as my parents did, and when I became a writer of books, they bridged me back toward my parents through the things I could share in writing that I couldn’t share with them off the page.