Franny Choi's Speculative Mode

Levi Todd spoke with Franny Choi about her second poetry collection, Soft Science (Alice James Books), for The Rumpus.  The book "questions the lines that separate humanity and technology at the same time it questions the lines that separate race, gender, sexuality, and migration status," writes Todd. From their conversation:

Rumpus: The second to last poem in the collection, “Introduction to Quantum Theory,” really reminds me of José Olivarez’s “Mexican Heaven.” They’re both speculative poems that present what could be a utopia, and then both poems force you to question that concept. What do you imagine the role of speculative poetry to be?

Choi: I love that poem by José and am so happy that you’ve put my poem and his in conversation. “Introduction to Quantum Theory” is, more than anything, a thought experiment. And I think that spirit of asking yourself a genuine question—even if the range of possible answers might be scary—is something that poets are actually really good at. There are a lot of poems that I consider to be in a speculative mode that seem far away from sci-fi or fantasy. For example, Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact” is simply making a proposition and briefly running with it, and I think that’s speculative writing at its root.

On the subject of thinking about utopias specifically: given the state of the world, I don’t think that there’s a danger of having too many poems that ask, “What would it feel like to be free?” I would like to hear as many of those as people can create. The particular superpower that poets can offer to the wider field of speculative literature is specifically in the realm of feeling, in our ability to imagine new emotional relationships with the world around us. Generally expanding our affective lexicon makes us more intelligent beings in order to survive whenever apocalypses come our way. I also think that it’s important to have poems that are exploring dystopia...

Read on at The Rumpus.