DM: Thank you for taking the time to do this, Jonathan, and congratulations on the publication of going home. I was especially impressed that Rowan Williams was one of your endorsers!

JC: Thank you so much for having me, David, and for your kind wishes. It’s a real honor to be able to speak with you and to share about my work with the Among Winter Cranes community. That Rowan Williams was willing to provide a blurb came as a shock to me – he supervised a dissertation I wrote as an undergraduate on R. S. Thomas and Derek Walcott. I reached out to him on a whim and didn’t expect him to respond. The fact that he provided such a considered and thoughtful response is something I am deeply humbled by and grateful for.

DM: In all of my encounters with him I have found him to be remarkably gracious. 

Let me start by talking about going home, and then I’d like to explore some other questions related to faith and poetry, and what we have called a ‘Christian poetics.’ One of the things that impressed me about this collection is the spatial imaginary of the poems. By this I mean that issues of place and of finding one’s place are constantly being engaged and negotiated (hence, ‘going’). In one interview you say that these poems were born of ‘a kind of restlessness’. Can you say more about the collection’s spatiality, and in what ways you find restlessness in the effort to finds one’s place is generative for your own creative imagination?

JC: That’s a lucid observation; I hadn’t thought about the poems in terms of the spaces they explore, particularly since so many of them flit between different locales. However, I think you’re exactly right in describing these poems as engaging with and negotiating space. Part of my writing poems has always emerged from a desire to encode particular memories of space in their various sensorial and affective dimensions. A poem like ‘farewells’, for example, in which I attempt to inscribe the last glimpse of a place and a person upon a departure – Seoul and my maternal grandmother, Houston and my paternal grandmother, Singapore and my own mother. Perhaps part of that articulation of space is an attempt to capture a feeling of belonging to a space, as if to say that the writing is a way of working out a sense of familiarity and intimacy necessary to having some claim to belonging. 

Yet, however much one can attempt to articulate a relationship to a space or more specifically, to a place, I think I’ve actually been hindered by other feelings of disaffiliation or alienation from places I’ve held dear to myself for one reason or the other. Sometimes that has come from a kind of dissonance I’ve experienced between how I speak and act in relation to the places I’ve been in. Perhaps it is that feeling of friction that has often planted the seed of creativity – poetry has arrived as a form of articulating a sense of discomfort, a clashing between my desire to cling to different elements of my upbringing and larger assimilative pressures in the different locales my family has been based in or where I have lived. There is a more casual friction that also arises from travel for leisure, though I would argue that such experiences have not quite rattled me quite as intensely as travels to places where I have been among family and friends.

DM: I love that combination of affiliation, or at-home-ness, with its opposite, the frictions of alienation and foreignness. Still in that vein of matters of space, of what spaces become as we inhabit them, the creation of scenes in the poems is one of things I find most compelling. And I love the way you punctuate (‘puncture’?) your scenes with reflections. In the first part of “another life,” “New England,” for example, you give us the icy character of the landscape, “the featureless pathways/ of a pilgrim’s imagination” (love this phrase and its historical reference!). As the poem progresses you then observe how “the mind bristles” at “the inadequate metaphor/ of concentric circles.” Can you talk about that notion of inadequacy as one of the problematics that going home explores?

JC: I think the language of inadequacy is helpful, as that in some ways gets to the heart of the lack of authority I sometimes feel to speak of a space or to claim to be able to reside in a space. The sacrality of space, as it were, and one’s relationship to a land or landscape come to be part of that imaginary. I think the interweaving of the descriptive and the reflective in my poetry is a manifestation of that. There is always a heightened awareness of my position as I navigate certain terrains or neighborhoods precisely because of the inadequacy I can feel about where I stand. 

The poem ‘another life’ is an interesting example of that. The writing of it arose from a trip I took to the US while I was an undergraduate in England. My parents lived in New York for a long time and I was born in Manhattan. As a result, Manhattan ended up being a kind of mythicized homeland in my mind, a place that could very well have been where I grew up had my parents not chosen to move to Singapore. My father once spoke of how he might have even looked for a place in Connecticut and commuted into the city. In addition, when I was applying for university, I had always thought I would ‘return’ to the US as an undergraduate. The consequent divergence that came when I chose to go to school in England became another kind of fork in my life. And before all of that, my father’s parents decided to emigrate to Houston, Texas, from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia for a bevy of reasons. Ostensibly, one of them was so that my father could begin his career there, which did not come to pass. 

My writing of ‘another life’ was an attempt to chart alternative trajectories my life could have taken had I attended college in New England, had I grown up between New York and Connecticut, or had I been raised in Houston. The image of ‘concentric circles’ was very much an attempt to reckon with places from which political and cultural influence emanates. Having gotten involved with the campaign for decolonizing the English literature undergraduate curriculum, I had been thinking a lot about the idea of the colonial metropole and the peripheral outpost, particularly in terms of the ways in which cultural or literary influence flows. There is a persistent asymmetry that continues today in terms of the mighty cultural heft of the United States and part of me thought about how thinking of going to school in these centers of influence could not account entirely for making a life decision that worked best for me. 

That comes back to the sense of inadequacy I’ve experienced in being able to find my place in countries and communities, as well as the suspicion I’ve held toward my own motivations through those processes.

DM: I’d like to lean into your understanding of what poetry does and does not (should not) do, particularly in regard to the religious. In your piece “On Hermeneutics and Poetry” you worry over the possibility that poetry gets “instrumentalized” especially with some Christian theories of reading, and instead would like poetry to preserve a sense of mystery, which resists the ways that some readers esteem poetry as a form of evangelism. You say, “one does not read a poem as an exercise in determining a set of beliefs, whether religious or political. To do so is to withhold from the poet the dignity of complexity.” It sounds like you are concerned about both the integrity of a poem as well as our reading of it. I’m on board with that. But I wonder if there is perhaps a false opposition here between a poem’s mystery and complexity and the ambition of the poet to persuade. I think here of Dante’s Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost, which clearly seek to persuade readers of their vision, or even of a work that I taught last year and which does not offer a particularly religious but a political and societal concern, Citizen by Claudia Rankine (along with her most recent Just Us), which also aims to persuade. I wouldn’t say that in any of these cases or the countless others we might mention that the poetry’s ‘designs on the reader,’ so to speak, sacrificed the artistic integrity of the work. Or is the religious a special case these days because of how antsy people feel about the subject, including perhaps poets themselves?

JC: That’s an interesting question and it gets to the heart of something I was wrestling with as I composed that essay. Much of it was informed by my experience taking a poetry class taught by Professor Christian Wiman in divinity school, where many of my peers were training to be Christian ministers and pastors. The tendency I sometimes detected was the desire to consider how the poems we studied might in and of themselves reflect a kind of theology or be put to pastoral use. The class was also themed around poetry and faith, which meant that the latter emerged organically as a hermeneutic starting point for the many poems we engaged with. 

What became apparent to me was that to view a poem through the prism of faith first, especially through a doctrinal lens, sometimes hemmed in the possibilities of reading a poem. Thom Gunn’s ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’ or Anna Kamieńska’s ‘A Prayer That Will Be Answered’, for example. That extends to an attempt to read a certain religious, political, or ideological orientation into a poem from the beginning. I think part of that betrays my training in practical criticism, where we were taught to pay particular attention to textual detail and close analysis first before then trying to impute a set of broader theoretical connotations. 

So, when I talk about the instrumentalization of poetry for evangelistic purposes, I think about how the anxiety of transmitting doctrine ‘rightly’ can sometimes stymy how we read poetry or even distort the ways that poetry resides in the church. Sometimes I think that contemporary churches would do well to provide a greater sense of apophatic space, places to dwell in uncertainty or a sense of absence without needing to arrive at a set of fixed answers. Poems have a certain way of remaining open to that sense of mystery. 

However, the argument I put forward in my essay was formulated specifically around poems that have that kind of ambiguity present in them. When we think of Dante’s Inferno or Milton’s Paradise Lost, it is very clear that these are long, epic, narrative poems that have a set of religious and political contentions at their heart. In terms of subject matter, they focus on divine settings and divine figures – heaven and hell, God and the devil, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve. They might not quite be considered contemplative poems as they were each written with a kind of urgency, though each long poem represents elements of interior exploration in their different characters. 

For the Divine Comedy, there resides a particular need to convey the depth of sin and its ramifications in the afterlife. That, as well as Dante’s own political convictions in favoring the Papacy over the Holy Roman Emperor and the eschatological consequences he envisioned for his political opponents. For Paradise Lost, which takes up the narrative of Satan’s fall as well as original sin, one simply cannot get away from matters of religious and theological substance. Nor can one really ignore the epic’s critiques of the monarchy, with God as a stand-in for King Charles I. For Rankine, there perhaps also resides a theological argument at its heart in its contention for recognizing the humanity and dignity inherent to members of the African American community. The very idea of citizenship is contested by microaggressions, racial profiling, and disproportionate police violence and incarceration, all of which contravene the notion of Imago Dei. 

All of this is really to say that one’s engagement with poetry is necessarily shaped by context – the contexts that particular poems were written in and the contexts we ourselves are shaped by and bring to the process of reading. There is some truth to feeling antsy about being explicit about declarations of piety and faith through creative writing in our current moment. However, I’m certain that’s also a consequence of how evangelicalism, particularly in the United States, has sought for itself a whole series of sordid political alliances. I also suspect this essay was as close as I’ve come to articulating an ars poetica for myself, in recognizing that matters of faith are integral and inherent to my writing, to the episteme and metaphysics of my writing, while also not wanting to be judged through some prism of pietistic purity.

DM: Having published going home and getting some very positive reviews, are you already looking to new projects? What might we be looking for from you in the near future?

JC: In a lot of ways, I remain both bewildered and humbled by the fact that a collection bearing my name has been published. I’ve continued to write poems reflective of new considerations, experiences, and travels. Several poems that contend with questions of faith I’ve written have been published in Fathom Magazine and Inheritance Magazine, while some poems about place have been released by Silver Birch Press and Gulf Coast. Quite a few of these poems were shaped by classes I took in divinity school and by my time living in New Haven. I also have a couple of translations of Classical Chinese poetry I prepared that will be published in Asymptote. 

Beyond poetry, I’ve been busy with some essays and reviews that are in the pipeline. I have a piece on R. S. Thomas forthcoming with The Yale Logos, an essay about the history of Koreans in Singapore forthcoming with Jom Magazine, and a reflection on Christianity in my family that will be published with Inheritance Magazine. I also continue to contribute book reviews to Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. 

Lately, I’ve also been mulling over and wrestling with the idea of ‘bright sorrow’, of the strange coexistence between joy and deep sadness that comes through repentance as well as in how we reckon with suffering as people of faith. I’ve been reading the poems of W. B. Yeats and Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, so perhaps some of that weariness has been seeping into me. There could be the seeds of another collection there, but for now I’m content not to rush into things. I’d like to devote some attention to going home – discussing it, sharing it, and hopefully getting it to the hands of people who appreciate it.

DM: That phrase ‘bright sorrow’ captures the termini of so much of the poetry I teach, currently with Literature of Trauma in particular, which not only asks us to re-imagine our theological coordinates (creating an ‘apophatic space,’ as you call it), but to deepen our comprehension of hope and joy. I will take that phrase with me!

Again, thank you so much for taking the time to give us a glimpse into your work and vision, Jonathan. We do look forward to seeing what is to come.

JC: It was a pleasure and privilege to be able to participate in this interview. I’m so grateful to you, David, as well as to the community at the Rivendell Institute, Among Winter Cranes, and the Christian Poetics Initiative for creating a space where writers who follow Christ can come together in community and fellowship. Thank you so much.