Leesie Matthiesen, Staff Writer
One of acclaimed poet Dr. Su Cho’s favorite writing exercise is called a “secret circle.” Taking a piece of paper, you sketch a circle and write a secret inside. Then, you draw a second circle around the first and write the time, place and people involved. In a third outer circle, write about what’s going on in the world at large. Randomly draw a dot in each circle and write a poem about only the items the dots fall on, drawing as near as you can to the secret at the poem’s heart without actually writing about it. works to invigorate a poem and “create its tension.”
During the reading of her debut poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish, in the Torian room, Cho shared that she “loves” secrets in poetry. She also shared that The Symmetry of Fish contains both a secret “break-up poem” and a poem she wrote while obtaining her undergraduate degree, although she wouldn’t tell the audience which ones.
Cho opened her reading of The Symmetry of Fish with “Waiting for Sunset,” an in-progress poem that she is still editing. She began sharing these “offerings” to spice up her readings and to “contribute to the kind of vulnerability” that she continually asks of her students. She doesn’t want to just share her poems that are certifiable “bangers” because it doesn’t feel fair. “I feel humbled every time I start that way,” she said.
She followed this up at the beginning of the reading by answering a difficult question: “Why do you write?” For her, it’s about catching “tiny, blissful moments” only to “realize you can’t ever do it again.”
“Poetry is, I think, a constant attempt at joy and feeling happy and then getting really bummed out,” she said, making the audience laugh in their seats.
Cho was born in South Korea before her family moved to New York when she was five years old and then to Indiana, where she spent most of her childhood. English was her “worst subject,” and poetry first clicked for her during her junior year at Emory University when she read the poem “Rowing” by Jeffrey Harrison in a textbook. The former editor-in-chief for The Indiana Review and guest editor for Poetry Magazine, Cho now works as Assistant Professor of Poetry at Clemson University and will begin working in Vanderbilt University’s Creative Writing MFA program next fall.
The poems that she read from her collection explore identity, language, culture, family, Korean mythology and the Korean-American experience with tenderness and precision. With humor and honesty, Cho spoke about the stories that The Symmetry of Fish’s poems tell. She discussed the experience of growing up very religious and then enjoying some “yolo years” in grad school and imagining the funerals that happened in Korea that she wasn’t there for. She talked about how some of the poems speak to the feeling of disconnection from a native country and the difficulties of navigating language barriers in an immigrant household, where English was learned as a second language.
During her interview with The Sewanee Purple, Cho described who might most enjoy reading The Symmetry of Fish, saying that “readers who have their own family stories they want to tell and don’t know how to quite get started, readers who are interested in excavating their own language of memory, and people who also grew up in the Midwest and went to church and are reflective” of the experience, might especially identify with her work.
Cho emphasized the role of language and sound in her poetry during her reading. Some of her poems engage in code-switching, including singular Korean words that are sometimes translated for readers and other times, left untranslated.
She explained that this is a way of mirroring the ESL experience for readers, of flipping the script so that it’s no longer her turn to pause at an unfamiliar word, but the reader’s turn to pause. Readers “have to make a choice.” Will they pass over the more complex characters in the poem, or will they look for the meaning behind the characters?
When she read “How To Say Water” from The Symmetry of Fish, Dr. Cho invited the audience to follow along with the poem’s actions, emphasizing that language is “a bodily act.” Later, during our interview, she shared one of her best tips for shaking things up in her poetry when it feels “stale” or like it could be more “vibrant:” remembering that sound is what “textures an image” and focusing on what sounds distinguish what she’s writing about.
“That’s where a lot of the language poems came from,” she reflected in our interview. “When I was trying to chronicle accurate poems about my childhood, they all felt wrong until I remembered that I never spoke in English with my parents, but I’m trying to write it all in English. As soon as I introduced one word that was repeated in my mind, I was like, this feels true. I was trying to filter the Korean out, but that was the entire sound of my childhood.”
Talking about her advice for poets in our interview, specifically for younger poets, Cho emphasized that poetry is a world that’s “shockingly full of people” and that “finding a community of other writers who are willing to grow with you is what will make your poems better in the long run.” “This book would not have been possible if I didn’t have my little group of other Asian American women poets,” she said. “We’re all interested in language, and we all write completely differently… but I think that’s the beauty of it. It’s always about people.”
This year, as she tackles new projects after The Symmetry of Fish, Cho’s goal is to prioritize her artistry, and she also has an even larger vision for her poetry. “I think I’m just always trying to write towards some kind of joy or making somebody feel special,” she said.