12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mia Kang
Mia Kang is the author of All Empires Must (AirliePress, 2025), which won the 2023 Airlie Prize, and the chapbooks Apparent Signs (Ghost City Press, 2024) and City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020).Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades,wildness, and elsewhere. Named the 2017 winner of Boston Review’sAnnual Poetry Contest, she has also received awards and residencies fromBrooklyn Poets, the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center inProvincetown, Millay Arts, and University of the Arts. Whatever prizes she haswon, she paid for three-fold in submission fees. www.miaadrikang.com1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does yourmost recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
My recent book All Empires Must is my first full-length, and I'mnot sure if its publication has changed my life. My main feelings toward itsrelease have to do with the strangeness of being nearly a decade removed fromthe process of writing it. The years I spent working on those poems (2015-2017),however, certainly changed my life. It was my first experience working on aproject at that scale, and it was also my deepest experience with writing todate, in the sense that I discovered how an immersive conceptual engagementcould process personal experience into something else. I think the book is moreserious, maybe braver, than what I've written since, but it's also less honest,or self-accountable. I guess that's the description of being young.
The best way of describing the difference between my recent work and myprevious is probably to say I have become less precious about poetry. Part ofthat is that I've become less ambitious, in the sense of some external idea of"achievement" as a writer. I want to be serious, but I do not want tobe prestigious, which I desperately did want when I was younger. That allows meto be looser, to try more varied approaches, and to let things take the timethey take.
2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction ornon-fiction?
As a kid, I actually tried to write fiction first. But I could never geta story to go anywhere. I would get mired in description. Plot held no interestfor me. When I first started getting serious about poetry, after I moved to NYCin my late teens, I also tried to write non-fiction intermittently. I couldonly really do it in email form. There's a trove of long emails I wrote tofamily members from the years I was 17 and 18, plus a bunch I wrote to a mainlyemail-based lover the years I was 18 through 20 or so. But I've never succeededin connecting with the essay as a form for my own thinking. I have the vaguememory––possibly fabricated––of my first poems being written on scraps ofpaper. Poetry writing, in that sense, was easier to hide. Haha.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Doesyour writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first draftsappear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out ofcopious notes?
Total variety. I tend to start from some kind of fixation. I've probablygrown more attuned over the years to what kind of fixation might be likely tohold up as the basis for writing and what might not, but I still get surprised.I think I used to be closer to writing on a day-to-day basis; I used to findthat first lines or sticking phrases would pop up and I would go from there.Since having my relationship to reading and writing completely reconfigured byvarious engagements with institutions (that's the avoidant way of sayinggraduate school), I've had to work much harder to make space for language toshow itself. I'm not very disciplined about it, frankly, and sometimes I feelbad about that.
The poems in All Empires Must often came in a single sitting, buteach poem (and the book as a whole) was at one point or another completelytaken apart, edited, and reformulated. Some of the early drafts wouldeventually kind of splice into each other and become different poems. My secondmanuscript (unpublished, titled PERISH / ABOLISH) arrived moreintact––individual poems still required refinement, but not in the same"down to the studs" kind of way. More of the thinking was doneexterior to the poetry, in the second book. Also I was really, really, reallyangry all the time. Poems would get spit out in an already hardened state.
4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of shortpieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a"book" from the very beginning?
I guess I jumped the gun and answered the first part of this above. I'malways thinking in terms of projects, whether the project is a "book"or something else. I can't stomach the notion of a poem that stands alone.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Areyou the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Still trying to figure this out! I do enjoy readings, kind of. I like thephysical act of reading aloud, and I'm interested in the thing that can happenwhen that happens with an audience. However, I am also someone who finds ithard to track a poem when I'm listening to it being read aloud. I greatlyprefer reading from the page. I know not everyone is like that, but it alwaysmakes me feel weird about reading publicly myself.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kindsof questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even thinkthe current questions are?
Yes. What is writing? Why am I doing this? Who am I doing it for? Whatdoes writing do?
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in largerculture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer shouldbe?
See questions in answer above.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficultor essential (or both)?
I can't say that I've had too much experience working with an outsideeditor on poetry. With my first chapbook, City Poems, I got some greatedits from the folks at ignitionpress. There was one long poem in particularthat they helped me refine over several versions. At the time, I hated theprocess, but it absolutely made the book better, and I think I would be muchmore appreciative of that kind of editing now. I wish I had had the chance towork with an editor on All Empires Must. It won a book contest, so itwas published basically exactly as I submitted it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily givento you directly)?
I don't know if I think it's the best piece of advice, but it's the firstthing that comes to mind: don't give up on a piece until you've gotten 100rejections. Sadly, much about publishing is a numbers game, given the totallack of infrastructure for poetry.
10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you evenhave one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Alas, I have no routine. My day begins with feeding cats and makingcoffee. From there it unravels.
11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (forlack of a better word) inspiration?
To writers and books I love. I'll reread the poetry books that have beenmost important to my writing life. I'll especially turn to the work of dearfriends. But also, and maybe more importantly, I need to go outside of writing.Learning something new helps, as does engaging with the material world(cooking, gardening, cleaning). Visual and performance art have often been thethings that get what's stuck to move.
12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Copal.
13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but arethere any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, scienceor visual art?
My study of art history has run alongside my writing since the beginning,I guess. Architecture moves me more than probably any other visual form.Watching and thinking about and sometimes making dance and performance havebeen central to my writing as well.
14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, orsimply your life outside of your work?
Wayyyyy too many to name, so I'll just say Cam Scott because everybodyknows it already.
15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
You're catching me in August, and I've been to a lot of baseball gamesrecently. I really, really want to be able to walk on the field at thePhillies' ballpark, with few or no other people on it. Maybe this is the memoryof the proscenium; I just feel I need to experience this.
16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you notbeen a writer?
I'm a nonprofit administrator, occupation-wise. I'm also qualified as anart historian, though I'm not teaching much these days due to the terribleconditions of that occupation. I'm working toward sitting for a CPA license. Iwish I could be an NBA player (I have never played basketball at all). Iestimate I will attempt 5-7 more occupations before I die.
17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I do many things else. Mainly else. I started my life as a dancer, and Igot injured. Writing is less expensive than say, painting, which I have notalent for anyway. Language is a source of pleasure and the stupidest kind ofcage (the one you make yourself!). Everything is writing.
18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The last great book was Emily Skillings' second book, Tantrums in Air,which came out recently from The Song Cave. I first read it in manuscript formover a year ago, and it is beyond fantastic and everyone should read it. Ibarely watch movies. The last great film I watched was probably Scarface,because I watch it once or twice a year, and I don't think Center Stage (withwhich I maintain a similar schedule) counts as a great film.
19 - What are you currently working on?
I am working on a booktentatively titled Rookie of the Year. The book centers around a long,overdetermined metaphor between my failed engagement and the so-called Process,the strategy by which the Philadelphia 76ers have been trying to build a teamand win a championship since 2013. I'm still early on in the project, but Ithink the book is really about the beauty of devotion and the incongruity ofthe devastation by which it is accompanied. Several basketball-related poemsfrom the project have appeared on The Rights to Ricky Sanchez podcast over thepast year or so. None of these are published in a normal way yet, but you canhear Spike Eskin read "Breach of Promise," or you can see me give a live performance on the occasion of the NBADraft Lottery. I have a lot of problems. Daryl Morey, please give me a presspass so I can write this book.
