conducted by Melanie Greenhouse

MG: After your harrowing escape from security police following the Tiananman Square demonstration, how difficult was it to get a plane ticket & visa out of China? What was your destination?

XD: My former translator bought the plane ticket for me in the US; I had no problem securing a visa from the American Embassy. In fact, the undersecretary in the Embassy sped up the time to issue me a visa because he knew that I was politically in a horrible stage. I got the visa quickly, and that was an important factor which enabled me to leave China immediately.

MG: In other interviews, you’ve spoken of how dangerous it was to be a poet in China because poets tell the truth. On your return to China in 1996, did you sense the same degree of danger?

XD: In 1996 and even now, there was and is a great danger for poets, artists and common people who speak the truth; who tell the true feelings of their lives without fear of persecution. The inhuman situation will continue unless the politicians open their minds and accept democracy.

MG: You spoke of a tragic childhood that was redeemed primarily through literature. What, besides literature, rescued you from becoming a hostile teenager? Adult?

XD: Poetry. Yes, it was poetry and the pursuit of being a poet. The understanding of poetry saved me from being a mean or hostile man. Poetry is supposed to be filled with love; longing of love; appreciation of beauty and nature; belief in hopes and dreams; deep understanding of human desperation, difficulties and joy in our lives. To write more poems, good ones, to determine to be a good poet, requires one to be a decent human being. The purer and kinder we are, the more power is contained in the poetry we create, which covers and penetrates more levels of human living experiences. The poetry will be more as itself to display the origin and transfer the force. The higher level I am in writing poetry, the deeper and stronger belief and understanding I have to present myself as being decent. Thank you so much for asking this question.

MG: Could you talk a bit about the Chinese aesthetic and approach to writing?

XD: We believe in the spirits. We believe everything has its own spirit. A tree, the wind, a narrow meandering river. We believe there are many lives within a human life; you do the kind and right things and then you will get good returns. We believe in following the spirit more than following the material. Perhaps I should say we used to believe in…Because now things have changed, have sadly changed a lot. To talk about the Chinese aesthetic, the best examples would be the poetry created during the Tang and Sung Dynasties. These poems were very abstract, but full of fresh and beautiful imagery and symbols, carrying the spirits of living to fly. They were very melodic, compelling and picturesque, but layers of meanings were deposited within. They are spiritual, detailed and  heartwarming!

MG: What is the most striking comparison you can make between American & Chinese poets?

XD: American poets put more focus on the details of objects; details of experiences; details of the writing process. So the written work presents much more clarity and sharpness. Chinese poets put more focus on the whole appearance of objects; the strength and broadness of the experience; the wholeness of the writing process. So the written work presents more of a macrocosm of its receptivity and perception, yet is more abstract and vague.

MG: Do you feel American poets might be too stuck in the present, possibly losing a spiritual connection with the past?

XD: This is a fast paced country; such a free country which embraces all kinds of new things and objects. The modern technologies change Americans’ daily lives in unpredictable ways. This is the reason why American poets are stuck more in the present: they live the same speed as that of the modern world. The United States does not have a long history; the modern era is much more striking and stunning, that’s also another reason why American poets are going with the present. Ancient countries, like China, are much more developed from the past; we do not treasure the present as much as we treasure the past. The ancient countries are more focused on the spirits and histories than on the living materials. That’s why the Eastern poets are connected with the past much more than the Western poets.

MG: Would you care to comment on the translation process? Your work with Keith Waldrop?

XD: I am very happy and grateful for Keith’s translations. I am very satisfied with his precise and beautiful translations of my work.

MG: Please comment on your attraction to the work of Van Gogh.

XD: The reason that I love Van Gogh’s paintings is that he devoted his life to art and to his spiritual desires. That spiritual desire of living in his heart and in his honesty—to display himself as a true and original human being—has deeply impacted me. Like Van
Gogh, I appreciate nature; I prefer being alone in nature than to be among crowds. Nature has given me inspiration and revelations of life. When I am quietly in nature, I can hear nature talk, that always gives me great happiness and makes me appreciate life in a deeper way. I admire Van Gogh’s ability to burn through his existence and creativity, and transfer such beauty, inspiration and love to all. A love which seems so lonely and full of grief, yet it’s powerful and poignant. His love tells us to be ourselves, to love and give, no matter what the circumstances.

MD: In your transition from a country with oppressive government policies to a country with relative freedom of speech, what effect has this had on your writing?

XD: To live as myself; to write, publish and speak without fear, this has all changed my life to the good forever. I can live honestly, with dignity, with sincerity, with my true wish. In the absence of fear, I can hear myself much clearer and deeper, I can understand and interpret my existence, and live in society in an original and undistorted way. I am in a good position to write pure and forceful poetry.

MG: Are you in touch with former colleagues in China? E-mail? Do you export any American poets? Which ones? Which Chinese poets do you promote in the U.S.?

XD: I am still in touch with my literary friends in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, through phone calls, email and regular mail. So far, I have only read American poetry in translation in Chinese, so I don’t feel competent enough to name some poets but not others. I will answer this question when I can read in English, then I won’t be prejudiced by the selected translations. For Chinese poets, I still would rather mention the classical poets, such as Du Fu, Li Po, Tao Yuanming, Qu Yuan, Bai Juyi, Li He, Li Shangyin, etc.

conducted by Jefferson Navicky

What Had Happened Was (Duke University Press, March 2025) is Therí Alyce Pickens’s debut book of poetry. Over the holiday break of 2024-2025, I had the pleasure of conducting this interview via email. Thinking about Therí’s rich and ambitious book, and our unfurling conversation, provided a haven for all the holiday season’s bustle.

Jefferson Navicky: I’d like to start with poetic forms. Your use of them throughout What Had Happened Was is wide-ranging and masterful. Villanelle, a crown of sonnets, palimpsestina (which was very fun to read about in your Notes section), haibun, and I bet I’m missing a few! What draws you to use poetic forms? Has this always been the case throughout your writing life?

Therí Alyce Pickens: Even though I’ve been writing poetry since I was eight years old, I still feel like a beginning poet. So, when I started practicing my craft in earnest in 2017, forms seemed like the best way to get into poetry. And, they were mightily helpful for a generative workshop like Community of Writers. They offer some degree of constraint, rules to follow, so that I don’t get too lost. What began as a way to practice – and shout out to Kiese Laymon who said “we’re not good enough to not practice” – became more attractive once I saw other folks achieving loveliness with them. For instance, Evie Shockley has a sestina in the new black called “clare’s song,” which is after Nella Larsen’s novella, Passing, and when I saw what she did with just the synonyms of words, I got thinking about the different voices synonyms conjure. That’s part of the inspiration for “Palimpsestina.” John Murillo has a sonnet crown in Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry called “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” which helped me think through the pacing of my own sonnet crown. He also has a few poems entitled “Variation on a Theme” which prompted my thinking about my golden shovel of the same name. I admire the folks who have dedicated their collections to certain forms: Odes by Sharon Olds, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassins by Terrance Hayes. They push and push on their chosen forms. Those books are as much about their various themes as they are about the subtle (maybe sometimes negligible) difference between ode and elegy or whether a sonnet is an argument or a love poem or what kind of the forms conjure.

While I appreciate the constraint of form, useful constraint, I think it also disciplines you to an extent…which is why I go for so many different ones!

JN: I’m glad to hear of some of the poets who inspired some of these form poems, because that leads into the next question I wanted to ask. One of the things I most appreciated about this book was its clear sense of lineage, its shout-outs to both contemporaries and those poets of the past.  I particularly wanted to ask about two poems. The first is “On Losing; A Hypothesis,” which you note is “after Bishop and Murillo.” I love Bishop’s iconic “One Art,” and it’s fun to read your “On Losing” and hear the playful echoes call back to Bishop. I wonder how both Bishop and John Murillo inspired this poem, and how their inspirations might have comingled. And then, I wanted to ask about another favorite iconic poem, Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” which is the source poem for your Golden Shovel, “Variations on a Theme.” I would love to hear your thoughts on that poem, and its long inspirational reach.

TAP: I love the obsession in Bishop’s “One Art.” Part of that is the form of the villanelle. I think the other part is that it moves at the speed of sound. That ‘L’ seems to propel the poem. The same is true for Murillo’s piece “Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop,” though Murillo’s piece is motivated by a different kind of loss – one more familiar to me – than the losses that motivate Bishop. I started wondering what a poem could look like if Murillo’s speaker wasn’t the observer but the participant in all of the medical drama. There are quotidian losses for folks who are experiencing disabilities, chronic or acute illness, ones that even observers don’t necessarily understand. So, I tried to preserve the movement of sound – the short ‘o,’ the long ‘o,’ the ‘L,’ and the short ‘i’ – and I started with science as a concept because of its prevalence in the lives of people with disabilities. “On Losing; A Hypothesis” is part of a sequence of poems thinking about routines as shifted by illness; it is followed by “Customary Calculus for Chronicity” and “Getting Dressed.”

“Variation on a Theme” feels like it came to me during the fever dream of June 2020 when I felt like some of us were living inside Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We real cool”: its honest recklessness and its searing commentary on how life is in the midst of impossible circumstances. I remember the photos of folks at the grocery stores with jerry-rigged water bottles on their heads and make- shift PPE and, alternately, some folks were fighting against masks and hollering about their rights. But, also there were people marching, masks on, singing Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.” It felt like the crucible where Black language and storytelling exists: this complicated nexus of state violence (through both combat and neglect), everyday living, music, joy, and humor. That’s why Etheridge Knight (the toast “I Sing of Shine”) and Claude McKay (the sonnet “If We Must Die”) are invoked in the poem as well. Also, “Variation on a Theme” starts off the section “& the Third” since that section includes poems that double back on previous conversations within the collection.

JN: Thank you for that expansive answer. I appreciate how you started off with the speed of sound in “One Art,” and ended in the fever dream of 2020 and Kendrick Lamar. In fact, that juxtaposition leads me into my next question. I enjoyed how your diction went high and low and all over the place; reading your poems kept me on my toes, not sure what would be coming in the next poem. One of the poems I especially enjoyed for its surprise was “I got into a Twitter beef with Lolo Jones over a blind white girl,” which, for readers who haven’t read the poem yet, is a breathless prose poem indeed about a beef on Twitter. I loved the phrase “put that phd stank on the tweet,” which nearly made me laugh out loud in my little back office. But then the poem focuses in tight with the line “i’m more like that white girl with my body that people think is a whole lot of can’t.” I was hoping you could talk about diction and voice in your work, and how they allow you to accomplish a poem like that one.

TAP: I am so glad to hear that! But if it only almost made you laugh, then I’ve got to try harder 🙂 I think the movement between formality and slang, jargon and everyday speech, confessional and braggadocio allows a movement through the different worlds of the poems. Where else would you be able to have celebrity, doctorates, athletes, and lay folks but the democratizing space of Twitter? (And I am deliberately using Twitter in this instance and not X. X is a different place.)

For me, language is how you tell the difference between who/what is safe and not, who/what belongs and does not. For instance, jargon gets a bad reputation because it alienates, but it also shrinks time for the people who need it. Academics have jargon, sure. We get lambasted for it (sometimes quite rightly). But, mechanics have jargon also. As does the tech industry. There are a lot of vocabulary lessons when you get your machines fixed. Those vocabulary lessons expand time. Sometimes people rely on that jargon to alienate folks. Sometimes, they give you a glimpse into the logic of a space or a culture. I am thinking now about all the maritime language we have embedded in English – what jibes, moving leeward, full tilt, half-mast, ships passing in the night – and how that language comes from Britain’s imperial conquest while English was becoming that burgeoning empire’s lingua franca.

When I think about what that allows me to do as a poet – that movement between types of language – I use it to allow me to move between different worlds with some degree of trust and authenticity. Besides, we all use multiple kinds of language because we (and I love this reference) contain multitudes.

JN: Oh, I love all that embedded maritime language! My last question comes from your poem “Ode to Checking My Shit,” which ends “I relish / the candle doing its work / cleansing the air / setting fire to some evidence / that I lived / but not the / moment of relief / to look back / at what I consumed / and let go / thinking maybe there’s / something / worth savoring.” I want to ask about that moment of looking back. In some ways, a book of poetry is little more than a record of what a poet consumed, as far as life, literature, and what matters to them. When you look back on this book, what do you think about, and how do you think about it? How do you think this book will sit in your memory?

TAP: I’m not sure I agree that it is ‘little more than a record of what a poet consumed.’ That hovers on thinking of it as paltry to me. I hasten to add I doubt you think of collections as paltry! I suppose I think about a collection as a way that the artist is accountable to their communities as a witness or an observer. I also think about what the poet brings to the spaces they’ve inhabited or imagined as a result of having written about those spaces or in them or in dialogue with them. Like I don’t think of the dictionary in the same way after Harryette Mullen. I don’t consider a couplet the same after reading Wallada bint al-Mustakfi.

For me, What Had Happened Was is a dream come true. I’ve wanted my name on a collection of poetry since I learned how to write poems. I remember the provenance of every poem. For some of them, I remember where I was or what I was doing when a line occurred to me. Like “Ode to Checking My Shit” started out as a joke – what can I write that might make Ross Gay, the poet of delight, be delighted? – and then quickly it turned into something more serious. It is and is not geared toward Ross Gay. (Side note: Ross was the last poet I saw read in person in 2019.) The poem is also in conversation with Camille Dungy who looks at nature and sees both what is there and what is overlaid there (symbolically, culturally, historically). Though I’m not sure the scatalogical is what she imagined!

The funnest bit of it all was ordering the collection. I put so much pressure on myself. There’s that saying: if there are 25 poems in a collection, the order is the 26th. I wanted to get it just right. But, when I sat down – after a few harried phone calls & emails with poet friends – to order the collection, it felt easy, like the poems were waiting for me to let them speak to each other, to trust them, to trust myself.

When I look back on this, I’ll remember the processes – of writing (and failing), of ordering (multiple versions of the manuscript), of revising (and getting frustrated), of submitting (and being rejected) – because those were processes of becoming more confident of who I am as an artist.