A Conversation with Adrienne Chung
BY DIVYA MEHRISH
Adrienne Chung is the author of Organs of Little Importance (Penguin, 2023), a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Yale Review, Joyland, Diagram, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she teaches at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop and is an editor at Sand Journal.
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Divya Mehrish: The title of your collection, Organs of Little Importance, draws inspiration from Darwin’s work. Can you elaborate on why you chose this title and how it reflects the central themes of your poetry?
Adrienne Chung: I came across the phrase one spring in a thrift store copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and was immediately drawn to it—it was musical, it was strange, it was whimsical, it was dark. I underlined it, turned it over in my head a few times, and went about my day. Some months later, in the hours before my master’s thesis was due, it popped into my head and I just went with it. I didn’t think much about it until a year later when a book contract came through and my publisher needed an explanation.
Revisiting the text was—and I’m going to be a little dramatic here—revelatory for my manuscript, its thesis brought into relief by the concept of vestigial organs of the psyche. I had previously been working with a cognitive framework around vision, perception, and doubt, i.e., why do we see the things we see? How do we know what’s real and what’s not? What even constitutes the real? Ironically, Darwin categorizes the human eye as an “organ of extreme perfection.” It’s obvious now that I was trying to strong-arm my manuscript into an epistemological container that didn’t quite fit. Ultimately, the themes of the book emerged through the work itself. Only after everything was written was I able to understand what I was writing about.
DM: Your poems explore the vestigial parts of our psychologies, such as first impressions, thought spirals, and lingering memories. Your inclusion of Jungian psychoanalysis, particularly as it relates to an exploration of the speaker’s dreams, adds a fascinating layer to your collection. This is especially present in your poem “Ohne Titel,” in which you also make use of footnotes to delve deeper into the speaker’s dream space. What insights or revelations did this approach bring to your writing?
AC: Jungian analysis is a modality particularly suited to poetry; both practices are rooted in symbology and associative meaning, and both center the image as the site of transformation. It’s a powerful way to develop intuition, which is crucial to a poet, as writing a poem is essentially making a series of contiguous decisions based largely on feeling, without the prosaic bounds of chronology or grammar. It’s an intimidating process.
I used to drive myself crazy trying to find definitive answers to things like where exactly to break a line, but there’s only so much that craft books can teach you. Jungian analysis helped me see that there was already a source of wisdom inside me, encoded in the unconscious. It taught me to trust myself. And certainly, it shaped my book in material ways: much of the raw material that seeded these poems came from my dreams and the interpretations offered by my analyst.
DM: You make very nuanced structural choices in your collection, using forms including (but not limited to) diptychs, ghazals, and sonnets. How do these varied structures contribute to the overall texture and rhythm of your poetry, and why did you choose these specific forms to convey your message?
AC: I love working in form. It satisfies my Virgo moon and alleviates my decision paralysis. The stress of determining line length or the point of enjambment is gone. Many of my free verse poems started out in some received form or another. I actually have difficulty starting a poem without some sort of formal constraint. A bonus is that form prioritizes sound. I love when a poem has faint traces of meter in it, as if from a past life.
DM: Many of your poems touch on identity formation, childhood experiences, and cultural references, both to pop culture and elements of modern history, including 9/11, the O.J. Simpson trial, and even Disney princesses. How have these experiences and references shaped your own identity as a poet, and how did you hope they would resonate with readers, especially those who may share similar experiences?
AC: A running undercurrent in my life’s work is an aversion to the idea that poetry is obscure and pretentious, meant for intellectuals who experience life through a conceptually elevated lens. I feel like I’m on a perpetual one-woman crusade to get this idea out of the public imagination. My use of low-brow pop-culture references, like Tinder or Venus Retrograde, are in some ways an act of resistance to this. The woes of online dating and astrological transits belong in poems as much as anything else and deserve to be interrogated with the same sensitivity and rigor afforded to the things that more clearly “belong” in poetry.
DM: I want to ask you about “Dungeon Master,” your brilliant crown of sonnets, which is reflective of your command of your poetic craft. Can you discuss your inspiration for these sonnets? How do they reflect your exploration of unconscious obsessions?
AC: I’m going to preface this by saying that I was profoundly, often maniacally bored during my time in Wisconsin, where the alienation of being in the Midwest was amplified by the physical isolation imposed by the pandemic. This particular strain of boredom led me down a lot of roads I otherwise wouldn’t have taken, like signing up to be a practice client for a local spiritualist’s past life regression therapy practice. It was something to do, and I had nothing but time. I’d describe the experience as a new age guided meditation meets improv comedy.
A few weeks or months later, while ice skating on a frozen lake in the freezing cold (it was something to do), I told a friend, the poet Alison Thumel, about the myriad past lives I’d conjured lately. She asked if I’d written about them. I hadn’t. I tend not to write poems about things or events—I like to say that I’m an “ideas guy.” She then suggested that I write a crown of sonnets, one for each incarnation. It was a brilliant idea, especially since my thesis was still missing about fifteen pages that weren’t going to write themselves. So that was the genesis of the sequence.
DM: You also infuse an ironic sense of humor throughout some parts of “Dungeon Master,” such as in your third sonnet, when you write: “…I open credit / lines, finesse a score a little higher / than my SAT math score, which was perfect…” Can you speak about how you approach balancing humor with themes that are emotionally quite heavy?
AC: I always think about the scene in The Big Lebowski where Walter tries to scatter Donny’s ashes into the ocean, only to have them all blow back into The Dude’s face. That’s my answer.
DM: Your poetry includes highly personal observations and references to your upbringing and your relationship with your mother, alongside surprisingly universal themes. How do you strike a balance between the deeply personal and the broadly relatable, and what role does this balance play in connecting with your readers?
AC: There’s a Joyce quotation that goes something like “in the particular is contained the universal,” which I tell my students early and often. Half the battle of teaching creative writing is convincing students that “relatability” in literature isn’t the goal. We’re not trying to create a literary echo chamber for readers. We also have to have faith in our readers and trust that they’re intelligent, empathic people who are capable of and interested in understanding points of view different from their own. Besides, what’s relatable to one person is deeply unrelatable to another.
I’m often asked how I’m able to publish such private, intimate things about my life. Part of it is simply temperament: I’m an overthinker and an over-sharer by nature. I’ve had blogs since I was fourteen. Writing about my feelings and relationships and sharing them publicly is just what I do, and I’ve learned to accept the embarrassment that comes with it. It’s a casualty of the trade.
The other part comes from a desire to touch someone. I hope that by putting my interiority so fully on display—all of my unreasonable, over-sensitive, illogical, troubled, and reborn self—at least one reader out there will feel more understood, more seen, more heard, and ultimately, less alone.
