Franny Choi Interviewed at Divedapper

Yesterday at Divedapper, the plugged-in source for interview goodness, Kaveh Akbar talked to Franny Choi about coming up in poetry through the slam scene and through avant garde poetry classes, her poem in response to the the Michael Derrick Hudson controversy, her internet presence, and her first book, (among so much else). We'll give you an interview preview starting from the slam scene:

Did you come up in the slam scene?

Kind of. That was where my poetry became visible to other people, but I’ve been writing since I was a wee baby child. In high school I’d show one poem to a boy I had a crush on and he’d be like, “Oh, this is pretty good,” and I’d be like, “Yeah, thanks.” And that was pretty much it for sharing. In college, the community of writers that I found were all engaging in performance. That’s sort of how I fell into it.

That’s so funny. I think so many people find poetry through its romantic utility.

Yeah, totally. Except my poems, the poems that I was sending to people I liked—the boys I knew I liked and the girls that I didn’t quite understand why I liked so much—they weren’t like romantic at all. They were very philosophical and not even angsty. I was channeling the dead white men who had come before me for centuries.

That’s the path a lot of people take, I think.

Yeah. In college I kind of had these two different writing spaces. I majored in Creative Writing at Brown as an undergrad. They taught a very academic, a specific kind of academic poetry that was very avant-garde and kind of impenetrable. So there was that writing work I was doing, and then also spoken word poetry with all of these writers who were people of color and queer folks. So those were the big influential writing spaces I’ve been through.

Choi and Akbar go on to talk about how Floating Brilliant, Gone (Choi's first book) came together and what a first book can and should do. More:

I think Floating Brilliant, Gone speaks to a desire to give body to a very complex identity.

Right.

Can you talk about putting that book together?

I was just reading through it the other day because there was a class asking questions about specific poems, which always just throws me for a loop. Sometimes I forget that people will read every poem. And so somebody asked a question about the last poem in the book, and I was just thrilled that they had gotten to the last poem!

I think the first book has so many jobs to do, there’s so much weight placed on it. It carries so many burdens. I remember knowing what I wanted the book to do and I wanted it to do so much. I wanted it to be a kind of anthology of all of my work up to that point, like a "Best Of" sort of thing. And also to be a coherent project, thematically. I wanted it to be a bridge, to accompany the performances I was doing. And also, this was my introduction to the literary world in general, so I was trying to say who I was as a writer. And then, because my brain wants to turn every project into a big experiment, I wanted to see what I could do in this book that was going to be different from books that I had read in the past. Like, what new thing was I going to be contributing with my books of poetry? It’s like a huge responsibility for one project to have all of those things.

Be sure to read the interview in full. If you want to hear more Franny Choi, you can check out a recent episode of Poetry Off the Shelf with Franny and Saeed Jones in conversation.