Bhanu Kapil Interview with Esther Lee
Bhanu Kapil: How would you describe the force of pleasure in the text? In the risk of each compulsive missive? I didn’t know if it was a pleasure I took, in entering the intimate space between two split places, or something you, the writer, also took/gave? I noticed how the writer, you, Esther Lee, was both absent and incredibly present—in the particularity and vividness of the language. Numbness and desire sharing a space. The blank of Blank. Press “Send.”
Esther Lee: Pleasure is ridden with guilt and it’s also about bearing witness for one’s self, how that can potentially burden another too. As for numbness, I’m not even sure what that word means to me. I think, more so than numbness, the poems encompass a kind of delayed reaction, a processing for me. A number of the poems allude to my father’s alcoholism and a kind of delayed reaction to what had happened, witnessing my family’s coping. I’m obsessed with the notion of truth, of memory and lying. Adrienne Rich’s essays kicked me awake to consider women’s relationships with truth. I’m fascinated about how we come to believe in fixed and absolute truths and how much faith people often place upon memory to serve as a kind of reliable witness of their lives and history. These poems search for believers. Sometimes the poems kick the believer for believing; other times the believer is salvation. Then again, sometimes the poems lean toward acknowledging the futility of this search yet, as a Frederick Seidel poem noted, “I believe in nothing I do / believe in you”...
Bhanu Kapil: Esther, in what sense is writing a generative act for you? What emerges from blankness? What IS blankness, actually?
Esther Lee: Writing often for me involves a collage process and at least some of the “Blank Missives” poems employ this collage technique too. In hearing or seeing a word or phrase and placing it in a poem and placing it usually quite out of context, I feel like this move is where the generative part comes into play...how ambiguities which result from particular line breaks or including words with multiple parts of speech hopefully adds to the possibilities. I used to love making found-object assemblages made from all sorts of stuff. And I think that kind of process has transferred over to writing too. I try to pull words and phrases from places considered boring or “unpoetic.”
I usually have to work on more than one poem at a given time or work within a series to keep me busy, from worrying too much. What I hope will emerge from the blanks are actually more blanks, that is, questions around the identity of the addressee and addresser, the reader’s reapproach to the notion of a self. Blankness, for me, feels very familiar in terms of my experiences, especially while growing up as the daughter of immigrant parents. I associate blanks to the daily rigamarole and activity surrounding my upbringing—from translating (and not very fluidly) my parent’s mail and regular mishearings that occurred in conversation, to the missing associated with growing up in a family from a culture riddled with displacement, including [C]orean War reverberations.
Bhanu Kapil: In the space of the letter, a space both blank, partially erased and minutely confessed, what is exchanged and what is created?
Esther Lee: I like the idea of prompting a space in which the poem and the reader can connect more directly yet provoke an ambiguity (and maybe uncomfortability) around the notion of ownership of memory and voice. How the poems’ blanks are filled by the reader can influence the tone and psychological weight of the letter’s contents...taking liberty with what feels to be someone else’s memories, exchanging a blank for a blank.
Bhanu Kapil: Maybe, in considering these questions of pleasure, of jousisance—I’ve never totally understood that powerful word, how it relates to the contemporary American lineage of experimental women’s writing—you could talk about this specific project, Blank Missives, but also of your larger vision as a writer.
Esther Lee: I don’t think it’s a coincidence how laughter may be mistaken for crying and vice versa. The subjectivity involved in interpreting pleasure really interests me. For example, my associations with smells have shifted. As a young girl, my parents owned a seafood market in Maryland and I’d learned to associate those smells of scaled and bloody fish, which permeated so much of my childhood—in my father’s van, my parent’s clothing, within the store—as comforting, desirable, and familiar. Later, sparked by a particular family crisis, my association with even the mere scent of fish would cause me to dry heave. It had taken me several years to change that negative association back to one which allows me to visit the sea and breathe it in and without consequence.
Bhanu Kapil:In describing your childhood, the action of memory, you’re also creating a complex surface between what a body can hold and what a body is saturated with to the point of that thing passing through it, completely—emptying out the body. My question for your project is—how does language, the action of correspondence, hold memory or intensify it only to, instantly, dissipate it?
Esther Lee: Memory’s been this kind of dangerous and seductive thing always. I learned how my memory of a shared event or conversation can be very different than my father’s, for instance. For much of my childhood, I’d reimagined a history (and living legacy) of my father that I really had no evidence was based on fact, but rather, much of my memories were more likely developed from my (re)imaginatios, from questionably mis-rememberings or even results of my own presumptions.
Bhanu Kapil: Also, when did you begin writing? When did you stop being Esther Lee?
Esther Lee: I always thought I’d be a visual artist. It was kind of assumed when I was girl that, because I could draw, that I’d grow up to be an artist. Don’t get me wrong, I loved that stuff—drawing, painting, sculpture, etc.—still do. But I didn’t realize until later just how much writing had been influencing how I perceived the world and the visual art I’d been making then. My mentor, Ed Love, had advised me to seriously pursue writing and filmmaking since I gravitated to employing them in the visual art too. I was too stubborn to listen to him though. But a few years after his passing and after thinking about him and his advice every day for a few years, I finally got it. After a stint in [C]orea following college, I returned to the States feeling the “rub,” having been discriminated against in [C]orea for a job. The whole “can’t win for losing” feeling...not to be melodramatic or anything, but I was 23 and thinking, Damn, what’s the notion of a motherland, now?