Sally Wen Mao with Christopher Waldo
Scattered Across: Conversations with Asian and Asian American Writers from The Diaspora
The Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus (AAACC) presents Scattered Across as a series of conversations with Asian and Asian American writers from the diaspora. These writers were chosen especially for their artistic focus across nations and generations.
Sally Wen Mao is a Chinese American poet who currently lives in northern California. Her work has been published in a number of notable poetry journals, including Poetry Magazine, Crazyhorse, and Black Warrior Review. In perusing Sally’s two collections of poems, Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books 2014) and Oculus (Greywolf 2019), I was struck by the recurrence in her work of wholly inventive allusions to classical antiquity. The fourth and fifth poems in her remarkable series of “Mad Honey Soliloquies” take the shape of first person reflections in the voices of Xenophon and Pompey the Great. Tracing the history of mad honey — that is, honey derived from the nectar of plants containing hallucinogenic grayanotoxins — she ranges from these ancient generals’ encounters with the toxic substance to the report of an early twentieth-century British botanist. Her feverish reinventions of classical material also include a “Honey Badger Palinode” and a clever reimagining of the myth of Leda and the swan.
Sally and I had a conversation on Skype in August. We discussed our relationships as Asian Americans to the cultural legacy of the West. Equally so for the professional classicist and the contemporary poet, the iconography of the Western world serves as a crucial cultural marker, offering aesthetic standards that have endured for millennia. Whether the aim is to uphold or to undo these values, a reckoning with the West is unavoidable. We also considered the future of Asian American literature, wondering whether it might be feasible for Asian American writers to begin constructing worlds of our own invention.
Sally’s visionary sensibility promises a host of new perspectives on age-old ideas. Artists like her give me hope that we have only begun to explore the possible instantiations of the classical tradition.
Christopher Waldo: One of the things that we in the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus feel is particularly important when dealing with texts by living authors is giving them a voice in the conversation rather than making it an entirely scholarly discourse. That’s the impetus behind this interview series.
Sally Wen Mao: I like that idea a lot, because I tend to see that the poets are doing their own thing and the academics are doing their own thing. I remember feeling that way when I went to this Asian American Studies conference. Not that many people came to the poetry panel.
CW: In terms of forging connections between academics and poets, it seems like you’ve been in conversation a lot particularly with the scholar Anne Anlin Cheng. It seems like you and her are both interested in some of the same case studies and the same ideas, but you’re coming at things from different perspectives.
SWM: Definitely. I’ve been really kind of taken with her work. I read her new book Ornamentalism a few months ago, and I was really struck by the similar tropes that we’re focused on. She provided one of the epigraphs of my book Oculus. It was actually Saidiya Hartman that introduced me to her. I remember it very clearly. She waltzed into the office one day, because we were at the Cullman Center together, and gave me this essay by Anne Anlin Cheng. She said, this is a good friend and colleague of mine, and I felt like your work intersects. I read that essay, and I was very interested in her work after that. She’s done a lot of work on visibility, and Asian American bodies, and femme bodies of color.
CW: We have been wrestling with the idea of what it means for us to be classicists, to study the Western tradition while inhabiting these Asian bodies. How do you think about your own positioning in relation to Western culture, and particularly the Western literary canon? Your books are called Mad Honey Symposium — symposium is an ancient Greek word — and Oculus, a Latin word.
SWM: I think about this question as very complicated, because there is a canon outside of the Western canon. Symposium, that’s actually the word that I came up with much later. I knew the title had to have mad honey in it, but I wasn’t sure what that third word would be. I cycled through several words like theater, like arena; I thought about what are different ways to think about what I’m trying to do here as a poet. This fixation with mad honey began with something that was very simple actually. My friends and I were at a conference, at a writers’ conference, and we found an azalea plant, and then my friends started eating it. We had a wonderful night of going out dancing, eating the azaleas, and then somebody texted me afterward that azaleas are supposed to be poisonous; you’re not supposed to eat them. So I googled this, and I found this whole thing about poisonous azaleas and rhododendron and how it sometimes ends up in honey, and from that I discovered this whole Greek history of mad honey. So it was really accidental. It was really not intentional at all with my first book. All the references to this Greek tradition resulted from a bodily experience.
CW: As a follow up to the first question, I’ve noticed that your work often features the trappings of Western or European culture. It playfully reimagines and at times even defaces them. I’m struck by the way that Mad Honey Symposium starts. In “Valentine for a Flytrap,” the first poem in the collection, you write:
You are the caryatid
I want to duel, dew-wet, in tongues. Luxurious
spider bed, blooming from the ossuaries
of peat moss, I love how you swindle
the moths! This is why you were named
for a goddess: not Botticelli’s Venus —
not any soft waif in the Uffizi.
I was wondering, what does all of this Western iconography — caryatids, the Uffizi, Botticelli’s Venus — do for your work?
SWM: That’s a great question. These are Western systems of evaluation, right? Botticelli’s Venus is supposedly this paragon of beauty. I was more interested in exploring these wild, unbeautiful things, these things that you wouldn’t think of as beautiful, because they’re so terrifying. I guess it’s a way for me to reevaluate, right? What gets defined as beautiful, and what gets to have its place in this hierarchy? The word “symposium,” there are so many double meanings there, triple meanings. It’s not just a conference of the minds, but in Greek tradition it’s this wild party.
CW: It’s a wild drinking party.
SWM: A wild drinking party. In a way with this first book I was trying to tap into wildness and not so much civility. I feel like civility offers this contrast or this foil for that wildness that I was trying to interrogate and look at.
CW: It’s a sort of aesthetics by contrast, a negative aesthetics that prioritizes wildness and the sort of monstrous. I really like that. Do you remember when you were first exposed to classical mythology and what kind of an impression it made on you? I was thinking about this reading the beginning of “Flight Perils,” where you say, “Once I read the story of a girl/ who loved a flightless creature,” and then you go on to talk about Leda and the swan in that poem.
SWM: I feel like a lot of this is kind of unconscious. I wasn’t really being very intentional with these myths. I did take a mythology class in high school, and I also took a humanities class, and in both of those classes there was a focus on Greek mythology, which is interesting, because I feel like Greek mythology so dominates contemporary poetic imagination. I do it almost kind of unconsciously, but looking back at it now, I am more interested in the ways we can reshape our thinking around that or the hierarchies that are already present. I really wish that I had learned more about Japanese, Chinese, and indigenous myths. I wish those had more space in the course work.
CW: I’ve noticed that the idea of a palinode seems to resonate for you. In Mad Honey Symposium you have a “Honey Badger Palinode,” and then I saw you perform a breakup poem that declares itself a palinode, which I thought was completely brilliant. Can you talk about the significance of this idea of a palinode, what strikes you about it?
SWM: A palinode is going back and retracting something that was said earlier, and I just love that idea. We’re allowed to renege on our ideas, we’re allowed to change and transform, and we’re allowed to revise our own thinking process. That’s why I love palinodes, because palinodes are a really great way for me as a poet to reckon with some of the contradictions of life. The honey badger is such a metaphor for oppressed people in general. They have this reputation of being fearless, but there are biological realities that limit them. They’re not the strongest or the biggest. Part of the beauty of a honey badger is its own delusion. For me having a palinode was really useful to convey that contradiction. Same thing with that poem that I read in the performance, which was called “Ode to Egress.” It’s essentially an ode, but then it declares itself a palinode. I kind of like the echo there: ode and palinode.
CW: I’ve always loved the concept of a palinode. You know the myth behind the palinode, Stesichorus and Helen and the whole thing?
SWM: Actually I don’t know the myth.
CW: The ancient Greek poet Stesichorus apparently wrote a poem where he insulted Helen, and then he went blind. He realized that he had pissed off the spirit of Helen of Troy, so he wrote a second poem where he said that Helen never went to Troy; she actually went to Egypt and she never did any of these bad things. That’s the original palinode by Stesichorus. And then she supposedly gave him his sight back after he had apologized.
SWM: That’s so interesting that she gave him his sight back.
CW: I wanted to ask you about “Mad Honey Soliloquies 4 and 5,” which are written in the respective voices of Xenophon and Pompey. How did you go about inventing voices for these two hypermasculine military leaders from the ancient world? One thing that is particularly interesting about “Mad Honey Soliloquy 4” is that Xenophon actually writes the Anabasis in the third person. You never actually get that level of subjectivity from Xenophon himself in his actual account, so I love that you write a first person poem as Xenophon. You kind of invent that subjectivity for him.
SWM: Exactly! I love that. With those epics there’s this real distancing between the hero and the reader, but that’s what kind of mythologizes it, right? I was interested in his life. What was going through his mind as all of this was happening? Since that’s not in that book, I thought, you know what, I’m just going to make it up.
CW: I loved it, because his account is so matter-of-fact. It’s just this little moment that happens, but you flesh it out in this really interesting way.
SWM: What you said about the hypermasculinity, that was another thing that I was really interested in interrogating, because here are all these men who are hungry, and they find some honey. When I think about consumption, there’s so much punishment for women who eat, like Persephone who eats the seed, Eve who eats the apple. They fuck up everything by eating, so there is this way that I’m like, why doesn’t this apply to men? Here he is, he’s trying to eat and he’s trying to be punished, but he’s not getting punished. My favorite line that I wrote in this poem is “Imagine: a whole field of grown men on all fours.” I was like, I have to have that.
CW: I wanted to ask you next, how do you see Asian American literature developing in the future? Do you think that Asian American literature might outgrow this preoccupation with western culture or there might be something more substantial and permanent going on?
SWM: One thing that I think would be interesting, the direction that I’m more interested in is world building and creating our own worlds and traditions. I think about Octavia Butler. She [built] these incredible worlds within her books. I hope that Asian American literature can move toward a place where we don’t have to reference something from the past necessarily. We do reference history, but we don’t have to reference something in order to familiarize ourselves. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee [a canonical work of Asian American literature, published a week after the author’s murder in 1982] references the nine Muses, right? And yet, I feel like the Muses are used as structures, but the way that she looks at history and the limitations of language allows for interrogation. I would like to see us move toward a place where we’re not interrogating something that’s there, but where we can interrogate our own traditions. For my next project, I’m really interested in looking at the Chinese tradition, the myths and the lore. I’m looking to interrogate that, because a lot of that tradition comes from these male scholars, the Chinese male litterati, who had very limited imaginations when it comes to women. I’m really interested in interrogating our own references and histories.
CW: I have one more question. I wanted to ask you a little bit about your teaching. What do you try to accomplish in the classroom, and kind of what kinds of texts do you read with students?
SWM: I usually teach contemporary poets. In my last class I decided to teach mainly book projects. In the past when I taught introductory classes I taught a lot of packets. I would make these packets, and then read a variety of poets. When I started teaching more intermediate poetry classes I started teaching contemporary collections, because in this way students can recognize how poets arrange their collections, what is this idea of a project versus writing a single poem. I do this thing, I call it the “museum of you.” I have my students write things down, like what are your main concerns right now, what’s your current exhibition, what’s in your permanent collection, what are the themes that are going to come up?
CW: I love that.
SWM: It’s a metaphor for a person’s body of work, right? What’s in your inventory? What do you want to harness?
CW: What do you want to acquire?
SWM: What do you want to acquire? Exactly. So, that’s an exercise I’ve been doing a lot, especially with more serious writers, writers who are a bit farther along in their process, who might have taken a few classes before and are interested in pursuing poetry a little more seriously.
Sally Wen Mao is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books 2014) and Oculus (Greywolf 2019). She has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the George Washington University, and Kundiman.
Christopher Waldo is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Classics at Tulane University and the president of the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus. He recently celebrated the 93rd birthday of John Coltrane.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
