HoCoPoLitSo's video: Marilyn Chin is a badass Chinese-American poet

Marilyn Chin, a Chinese-American poet, speaks with poet and teacher Joseph Ross in April 2018 about her poems of the body, protest, and family. Chin, author of Hard Love Province, winner of the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Award for literature of diversity, will publish her new and selected poems under the title Portrait of the Self as a Nation in October 2018. She begins by reading “Beijing Spring,” written to the young man who held up his hand to fend off the tanks on Tiananmen Square, as an invocation for all youth around the world to speak up. Chin says poetry is important, a vessel from which poets speak. They discuss elegies; Chin wrote poems of mourning in Hard Love Province for boyfriends, family members and friends who died. “The personal grieving extends to a universal grieving,” Chin says. She reads “Beautiful Boyfriend”, which ends with the line, “the sweet whiff of oblivion.” They discuss the presence of the body and the erotic in her poems. She reads some of her “Bad Girl Haiku” and they discuss the playful subversion of the haiku tradition. They end by speaking about selecting poems for her new collection, which she calls her “greatest hits.” For more information about HoCoPoLitSo’s live or recorded programs or to donate to support their production, visit www.hocopolitso.org.