“It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly at The Best American Poetry and spotlight some of our extraordinary contributors. Please enjoy this interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka, curated by TQ Managing Editor Wendy Chen”.–Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly
Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Her fourth poetry collection, A Tinderbox in Three Acts, is a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay and is forthcoming in fall 2022 from BOA Editions.
Wendy Chen: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your fourth poetry collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts this fall as the next BOA Blessing the Boats Selections title! Has the way you put together poetry collections changed over the years?
Cynthia Dewi Oka: Thank you so much! I think the way I put together collections has changed from project to project, depending on the conditions of my writing life. Until very recently, I’ve always had to write around my primary responsibilities as a working mother. For instance, the poems in both Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012; revised edition, Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017) were written in pre-dawn hours, which were the only time I could be alone and focus on poetry without interruption. With Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021), I had a bit more spaciousness because my son was older, and I could enforce fiercer boundaries around my writing time as an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. I still had to work full time to support my family but at least I didn’t have to worry about debt because the program fully funded my studies with the Holden Fellowship. That was such a gift. I also researched and completed the first draft of A Tinderbox in Three Acts during that period.
WC: Are there any particularly formative experiences to your identity as a writer?
CDO: Teaching myself English by trial-and-error as a ten-year-old because the ESL program at my new school in Canada could not accommodate an Indonesian speaker was the most formative experience for me as a writer. I basically read everything in the school library with the help of a little electronic dictionary. It was helpful in terms of vocabulary, but I had to learn grammar by visually noting syntactical patterns in the texts, and then trying them out myself by writing short stories. Indonesian does not have tenses, so learning the nuances of time in relation to action in English was a bit like learning a new physics. Of course, I never encountered characters “like” me or contexts “like” the one I came from, but that has always been my reality, even when I lived in Indonesia because my family is Chinese Indonesian and under the New Order regime, most public expressions of Chinese culture and identity were outlawed. It’s wonderful, of course, to feel recognized by a text, but to me, experiencing difference and becoming aware of a wider range of human possibilities (and limitations) has always been the primary joy of literature. I didn’t, however, learn to speak English comfortably until I started listening to hip hop in my early teens. Before that, English just kind of sounded and felt like running water to me. The sonic patterning to rhythm, lexical play, and the enunciative and emotive qualities of speech as art in hip hop made it much more familiar to how I physically experienced my native tongue. Later, I taught myself poetry in a similar way, by reading widely – not just formally, but internationally beyond the American poetry echo chamber – and experimenting with syntactical, visual, and sonic patterns.
WC: What is your revision process like? When do you know when a poem is “done’?
CDO: I revise until I cannot revise anymore either because of I’ve hit a deadline, or because another poem or project is calling me to move forward. I don’t know when a poem is done, I just know when I have given everything I can give it!
WC: Who are you finding yourself reading now? What are they bringing to your life and/or work?
CDO: I just finished Reflections on Exile and Other Essays by Edward Said. It’s a tome! I had read Orientalism and a handful of the individual essays in this collection as an undergraduate, but wow, what a gift to return to his work in my mid-thirties and be able to re-engage his mind from a place of greater maturity and experience. In my early twenties, I was just trying to keep up with him on a conceptual level, but now, I can appreciate his style, his humor and shadiness (omg he was a master of shade), the immense range and rigor of his attention, and how nuanced his thinking was about identity, history, power, and ethics. His essay, “Jungle Calling,” about Tarzan as depicted by Johnny Weissmuller being an immigrant is one of the most hilarious, complex, and moving portraits I’ve ever encountered. I also loved to find Said constantly quoting Aimé Césaire, like a mantra or prayer that anchored him through all his life, specifically, these lines: “And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, / of intelligence, of force, and there / is a place for all at the rendez-vous of victory.” I have a similar relationship with a few lines from June Jordan’s poem, “Argument with the Buddha.” What Said brings into my lifework (they are inseparable!) is the sense that there is a long way to go after the end of the world.
WC: What projects are you currently working on?
CDO: I’m working on a new collection of love poems!
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A Portfolio of Poetry by Cynthia Dewi Oka
THE NEW ORDER
With your noses vigilant
to the ground,
forgive
an infection’s harsh
slander. I said I felt you
like teeth above,
teeth below, therefore,
I resolved to master
you like my own
memory. Yes, I rose
like a flower from the scrotum
of the devil. Yes, I
moved like a flood against
the igneous mother.
She was strong
as American radio, but you
are the ministry of bones.
Dig, and you will find –
like those nights I stood,
hand fisted not knocking on
my beloved’s door –
no body
on the other side.
________________________________________
FAUNA IS FLORA
A man I hold cries without bottom.
Thousands not born rakshasa decisive or dead already.
The soldiers cut into the shallow sacks of muscles gone slack.
Their shoulders shredded by feathers.
I admire the helicopter, said the sky while trucks of men in uniform dragged a flamingo across the mountains.
Ibu lifting the coal over his eyes making a dirt house.
What IS for if not conviction, ambition, ideology, onions.
A dog drank their blinding sound.
Our admirable lips could fit around a dying crocodile.
Whose sins wouldn’t stick inside a bucket.
Anyone more than the seven must have fire pointed at their crying the eagle from the well was everywhere.
My grown god, When.
Blood in my leeks while boots of my black hair.
In a burnt man’s stomach, there was my whole life I did not enter.
Hunger is believing anything had with a bucket of gun.
Ink my feathers she with waist like a vocal cord.
She someone’s baby in a crowd
_______________________________
MAO’S “COMBAT LIBERALISM” ADAPTED FOR THE NEW ORDER
WE stand for active ideological weapon
But this weapon stands for itself
To let things slide for the sake of a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague, or old subordinate, to touch lightly
To indulge in private faces
To let drift things if they do not affect one personally, knowing perfectly well what to avoid
To give pride of place to one’s own type
To not seek revenge
To hear as if nothing
To be among the masses and to conduct propaganda indifferent to them for their forgetting
as if ordinary
To see someone harming and feel, but to allow him to continue
To muddle along – “tolling the bell”
To regard oneself as major, unequal
while being
quite aware of oneself
a corrosive which eats away dissension
an extremely bad stem
To replace by kinds of goods in stock minds in conflict, our midst
To overcome staunch life, subordinating always and everywhere to collective ties
any person
All honest tendencies
____________________________
THE SOUND OF MUSIC
Everything, even the Von Trapps, comes late to this polluted land. I mean all night the stray dogs bay, the air explodes with worthless applause. Last night I pulled teeth rotted black out of a seven-year-old girl. Her belly was worm-taut, it made me think of the child wriggling inside my wife. How her feet crack like rivers six months of the year, how thin the membranes are inside her. I know how to keep my head in the New Order, but watching her watch Maria spin on a living hill, I want to offer her neck a scrubbed blue sky. Lace it with lake-feathered geese. Some nights, I wake to brine pouring out of my pores. It’s the same every time – four blades spinning, a fence of people tall in black coats (where are the mosquitoes?). What does the nun say? A dream that will need all the love you can give. We buried our first child under the frangipani in the yard whose petals are a version of snow. I am trying to decide what I can and cannot say to myself. For instance, the web holds the blue-backed fly like an unsung note. Today is not always to die.
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Author: Kristina Marie Darling
