TL: I always took poetry seriously, but I never took myself seriously as a poet until I applied for the Arts Research Center Fellowship while I was at Berkeley, after I transferred from community college. Since then, I’ve pretty much decided that I will devote my life to poetry in as many ways as possible. But being from the Bay, place and the hyper-local is always on my mind. 


RLU: What does poetry do for you? How does one come to the decision to dedicate theirn life to it? 


TL: I think poetry is a rigorously liberatory space. It's taken a lot of work to train myself to receive and enact the poetic in my life and in my writing, which of course is just an extension of my life. When I was going to acupuncture more regularly to get back into my body, my acupuncturist could tell whether or not I was writing based on how energy was moving from my body. 


Poetry is the one thing I try not to overthink. In the same way as in this iteration of reality, what’s called queerness is actually just something deeply innate within me. I don’t think those innate things should be questioned and I also feel the rational, thinking mind should be employed for either strengthening the consciousness around it and building praxis around what actually emerges. 


I don't know if I'd call that a poetics—poetics is a weird word, but I think it's a sweet word as well. For me, ‘poetics’ is indicative of a rigor that I do respect. I’ve been taught by many different kinds of poets at this point. I actually never took a poetry class at Berkeley, so I never got indoctrinated by the Language poets, thank God. I would have loved to take a class with Lyn Hejinian, who CA Conrad refers to and has said of the women poets of Language Poetry, that the women poets were the true poets and all the men were bullies. I studied political science when I was at Berkeley because I think my Libra rising really wanted to get into what I thought was the root of the machinations of the world. I have always had this deep sense in my body, ever since I was little, that I'm not supposed to be here, like there was something deeply wrong about my place in the Bay even though I was born here. 


I was born here to two Vietnamese refugees. I think legally, they're classified as refugees, although the image of what a Vietnamese refugee was, in that time, located around the idea of the ‘boat person.’ I have a lot of feelings around the nature of liberal humanitarianism. Of course, thinkers like Mimi Thi Nguyen have written about the failures of liberal humanitarianism in the decades that have come to pass. Anyway, I have a very rationalist political science training because my parents wanted me to be a lawyer because I could do math. But then the pandemic happened.


RLU: I’m curious about this wisdom that comes from deep within (maybe the deep without?), the cosmic knowledge of ‘not supposed to be here.’ Does this correspond with or relate to what you cited as poetry as a liberatory framework? I would also say poetry can employ itself as a linguistic or cartographic approach toward liberation. How do you think about that? I’m curious because an interest in political science is also an interest in organizing, in a way, whether it's within neoliberal government structures or assembling information to attack them. Which is all to say, poetry can be a system of organization. How does poetry organize you? 


TL: Being in the Bay Area, the people who are teaching me lived amongst the Beats. They probably were Beat poets themselves or were hippies, through and through. The trouble that I've had with that (Beat) approach is this idea that poetry can be anything. That’s the power and the threat of it. I am a firm believer that there is good poetry and that there's bad poetry. I think the most generous thing that I can do for someone is tell them that their poem is bad and they need to go back to the drawing board. Yeah. I think the most useful phrasing that I have to get through the Bay Area poetry world is if I am sitting in a reading and I think to myself, this is not art anymore, I get up and leave. I will acknowledge that level of judgment and rigor comes from a place of deep self criticism as a part of what old lesbians might call “consciousness raising.” I'm sure the Marxists call it something else. 


But how does poetry organize me? Great question. I was raised by a Capricorn mother who I didn't realize until recently had put this narrative in my brain that I was an extremely undisciplined person. I was always asking around, how do I discipline myself? How do I discipline my practice? The more that I've talked openly to my writer friends about this the more I realized through their observations that I'm actually a very disciplined person in what I do. My poetry is split between two places. I either hand-write, or I write on the typewriter. My typewriter is my grandpa's that my dad saved for me from my grandpa's junk pile after he died. I put a lot of physical constraints on my writing, which I find really exciting and generative. The four inch text block on that risograph print that I gave you actually just comes from like a scrap of paper that is that long and wide that I put in the typewriter.


RLU: So when you say the physical constraint, you mean the actual form or space that the words are allowed to take up. 


TL: Yeah yeah. Since it's a typewriter, it will physically stop you from writing. You'll hit that margin and you can't write anymore. It was like cutting me off. I had to honor every typo. Brian Eno says errors are hidden intentions—maybe not your intentions but the writing or the machine’s intentions. I think that Google Docs is the enemy. I wonder, does everyone's poetry sound the same because everyone's writing in a Google Doc? Polemics are what I really like. That probably comes from my politicky background, maybe. Is that politics or how this energy that I have inside of myself has been channelized? These days, I’ve found my energy goes to Bay Area Lesbian Archives (BALA), my poetry, and my tutoring job, which is an educational space that is really vital to me. I found that every time that I write a poem for one specific person, those are the poems that actually reach more people. Maybe it's because it arrives in the specificity of that relationship, which can make the reader’s experience voyeuristic and fun. 


But how does poetry organize my life? All I know for sure is that everything arrives in the poetic; in the poem.


RLU: How has volunteering at the Bay Area Lesbian Archives influenced your poetics? How has the archive itself influenced your poetry? Your video poems engage with archival material and queer ancestors like Etel Adnan and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. I was struck by how, just being in the library of Elana Dykewomon’s house, you can feel the presence of all of these like dykes from generations past. 


TL: BALA is a community archive. It's not an institutional archive whatsoever. It was started by one devoted dyke, Lenn Keller, and is now being stewarded by all of us. 


RLU: The fact that it's a home also seems really important, maybe even metaphorical or poetic, in the way that queer people have not always had access to home. Not to mention the fact that in a home, you have a kitchen table that everyone can gather around. You have rooms where people can feel safe. 


TL: There's also something to be said about the repair work and the healing of any number of the women in our collections who in a domestic setting might not have experienced the kind of safety and care and regard that the materials they left behind are afforded now. BALA’s mission statement reflects this: we have a spiritual obligation to the pleasures of our inheritance and to tending to our grief as acts of radical and revolutionary love. The grief is immeasurable and the pleasure is immeasurable. I think they must coexist. We must engage with them as coexisting forces.


RLU: Can I ask what feels like a very basic question? Why is an archive important?


TL: Thank you. Basic can also be essential. I arrived to the archive from the tradition of ancestor veneration within the Vietnamese context, which is older than Buddhism. It’s older than Catholicism. Americans don't know how to honor dead people other than by making them heroes, martyrs, and if you're Catholic, saints. But I grew up with such a strong sense of remembering my ancestors—the named and unnamed, known and unknown. I'm in the firm belief that you don't have to know your ancestors names to know them, which is my little fuck you to genealogy. 


(Sharon, Advising Archivist of the Bay Area Lesbian Archives, comes outside.)


TL: It's this idea that you pray to your ancestors regardless if you knew them or their names. If you're here, that means they're there. That's all you need to know. I bring that ancestor veneration practice here.


Sharon: Thank you. Thank you for doing that. 


TL: For me it's a spiritual thing.


Sharon: There are other, for instance, Black American lesbians here who would agree with you about that. That's a hard thing to pass on. For some of our younger archivists that's not in their conceptual world. They're interested in somebody, like, “Wow, what a great person. The things they did. The things they accomplished.” But they don't have that same—they don't feel like that. That's a hard thing to transfer. 


TL: It's really not a closed spiritual practice. I wonder if I could build a frame or at least maybe try to emphasize when I encounter people here, the really fundamental spiritual work that needs to happen if we're ever really going to do repair.


Sharon: Absolutely. And it is a family. It is a community. It is a community archive. Our family is represented here by the people who come to volunteer or to garden or whatever they're doing. It's all part of this lesbian family. 


RLU: What is it with lesbians and poetry? 


Sharon: That is a wonderful question. There was a flowering of poetry in the 70s, 80s, 90s. Everybody was writing. It seemed like the whole world was writing. There were places to publish poetry: the local newspaper, a journal that was coming out, and small presses. The first of those Shameless Hussy Press books like Pat Parker and Mitsuye Yamada, all of those people were friends. She herself was a poet. She said, “I'll just make these books.” They're made with staples and relatively good paper. 


It was a wonderful flowering. I used to go to Mama Bears and read my poetry. People enjoyed it. I really had not studied poetry. I'd read a lot of poetry, but I had not studied it. I was in my infancy of writing poetry. I read the American-British canon. I just read voraciously. I read every poet I could find. It was a self study. And did I know that Walt Whitman was gay? I loved Walt Whitman, you know? No, I didn't. But that doesn't really matter. His self expression was wonderful. WH Auden, another favorite of mine. May Sarton, she is a wonderful poet. She wrote a couple of novels. One of her novels was, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. She was a wonderful poet and a lesbian. I know that only much later because people came out much later. 


But I just read all the time. I read everybody. A lot of Indian poets were really wonderful, but they were coming out of that colonial world, so they were writing somewhat Tagore. I read Chinese poets, because, why? Because Gary Snyder started translating a lot of Chinese poets. The Beat poets, wonderful. Alan—all of them, many of them gay.


RLU: What is it about poetry? 


Sharon: What is it about poetry? It finds a truth. It finds a truth and it becomes part of you. It's like music. Poetry is like music to me. I feel music in my body. I feel poetry in my body. I didn't learn to have conscious thoughts about it. I had physical responses. There's a wonderful South American poet, Cesar Vallejo, “There are blows in life / so hard / blows as if from the fist of God.” 


When I went to Smith College, I took poetry classes. It was like ‘63 or ‘64 when I went to Smith College, and there were some great poets there who taught poetry. Oh, my God, the world of poetry opened up into this sort of wonderful cerebral world too, not just things I feel in my body. That's when I wrote about the happy old cow. I learned a shape of poetry I didn't know. I didn't know so many things. And then I learned a lot. I learned a lot about the construction and the crafting of a poem. I mean, you could have all this sort of raw imagery inside you. That's great. It might be really great. But if you can't craft it in a way that people can respond to it… Anyway, I learned about writing poetry, and that was wonderful for me. I wrote a lot of poetry too. 


If someone asked me, “When you're in despair or you feel depressed, where do you turn?” I’d say I turn to poetry. Always. That's what gives me hope and a sense of being. Rilke is someone I turn to very often. I turn to painters because I love images. When I look at a painting, I see the poetry of that painting and often I will write about that. 


Let me ask you, what does poetry do for you? 


RLU: What does poetry do for me? 


TL: Asking the interviewer.


Sharon: Yeah.


RLU: It's a way of understanding what I want.


Sharon: I like that one. That's a good one.


RLU: It's a pretense for meeting people and having conversations. It's community. I think poetry itself is a form of translation. It's a way of translating the inner world and bringing it into this sort of shared material space. I often feel like when I express it, when I'm expressing myself on the page, it turns out very differently than when I'm expressing myself in speech. I don't really know exactly what I am reaching toward if I'm just speaking, so I find writing to be very clarifying.


Even when I'm with my journal in my bedroom and I'm writing, it provides a mirror. I feel like the main way that I've understood who I am in the world is through writing. I guess it's also identity formation. It's creation of the self. I've always surprised myself in my poems. I find that to surprise myself means that I'm not knowable—


TL: —weirder, freer—


RLU: —and maybe I'm not even knowable to myself. The joy is to continue to uncover yourself as we live. Not to get to the bottom of the barrel. But to search. 


Sharon: I absolutely agree with just everything you just said, and I understand it. I do. I understand you. Yes, when I need to think something through, the way I think it through is to write and write and write and write and write.


RLU: Also, for me, it comes back to Trinh, what you were talking about earlier, about liberation and poetics. I feel that until we can say who we are, we can't really say what we stand for, or who we stand with. So for me, writing poetry is also a way of formulating what I am against as much as what I'm for. 


TL: Writing helps me understand what's happening in the relational field. Where I actively explore myself is in journaling. There's a distinction for me. The stakes, of course, feel meaningful to me because I feel like I try to be a version of myself that my ancestors can be proud of. 


Sharon: Oh, god, that's so important. How will you remember yourself? How will you remember this time? How will you be remembered? All of those questions are so basic. This is so basic. I see what's going on in that world out there, and I think, is this how you want to be remembered? This, of all things. So I turn that back upon myself, and I say, how do you want to be remembered? 


TL: Poetry for me is the trace. And part of that memory work. I think of it as: I was here and this is what I was feeling or this is who I was having an argument with. 


RLU: I also think in terms of relationality, I feel like queerness also, as we know it, as it's named, only exists in relationship. Anybody can embody some sort of alternative or deviant sexuality as an individual, sure, but to express queerness, to put that onto someone else, or to have an exchange that is labeled as ‘queer’ requires other bodies. That also potentially informs what poetry is or can be, or what poetry does, which is it brings people together and helps people exchange ideas.


TL: For anyone who's deeply devoted to themselves as a queer person, devoted to their queer community, and is deeply and rigorously devoted to self exploration and understanding the societally-imposed limits around them, there’s a negotiation between this effortful work to allow what is very innate to come through.