By: Jerome Newsome

Marianne Chan is a poet and professor, whose work touches on memory, colonialism, and religion. Additionally, she was poetry editor for Split Lip Magazine between 2017 and 2019. She made her debut with her poetry collection, All Heathens. She also has a collection forthcoming in 2024 titled Leaving Biddle City. Her poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.

Marianne grew up in Stuttgart, Germany and Lansing, Michigan. This interview took place in her office at Old Dominion University, where she teaches several classes. One of those courses, Craft of Literary Nonfiction, I’m currently enrolled in. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

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Jerome: How did you find your voice in poetry?

Marianne: I think finding a voice is something we continuously do as writers. It’s not something that you just find and you have and you keep forever. As we change as people, we also change in terms of our poetic voice. I experimented a lot. I like to write with syllable constraints. So, for the first poem in my collection, “Momotaro in the Philippines”, almost every line has seven syllables. I really enjoy doing that. Syllable constraints helped me find my poetic voice. Also, reading a lot and being inspired by other writers. As a young writer, I really liked Frank O’Hara and imitated his work. I spent a lot of time reading other poets and writing imitations. That helped me figure out what I can do in poetry.

What’s your favorite poem in your collection, All Heathens?

One poem that I read at every reading is called “Elegy for Your Master.” It’s a poem that I wrote for Enrique of Malacca, who was Magellan’s slave. And I really liked that figure. That was the first poem I wrote that would be All Heathens. The poem really captures the main themes of the collection, which is moving through the past to discover ourselves in the present. For that reason, “Elegy for Your Master” is one of my favorite poems in the collection.

In your poem, “A Country of Beautiful Women,” you reimagine Snow White and place it in an Asian perspective. Why did you choose Snow White?

Yeah, so in that poem, I wanted to explore colorism in the Philippines. So, I grew up in a community that really valued light skin. For example, when I was younger, I went to a tanning salon. When I came back home, my mother noticed that I had darker skin. And she was really angry at me for that. I wanted to think about in this book, and in that poem, the ways in which that preference, that behavior is attached to a history of colonialism. The Philippines was colonized by Spain for 333 years. Also, it was colonized by the US in the 20th century. And so, I think that there’s this internalized oppression that causes Filipinos to have that type of perspective and to say those types of things. And I don’t like it, and I get really angry, and I have arguments with my parents about it. They defend themselves and say that it’s a cultural thing. But it’s not a cultural thing. It’s really because of this history, this violent history of colonization. It’s something that I want to talk to my Filipino community and my family about more.

In your poem, “When We Lived In Germany,” you portray the experiences of Filipino immigrants living in Germany. But, the last line significantly stood out to me: “Our children are now the clocks at which we glance to measure how long, how distant, how cruel.” The repetition at the end mimics the hands of a clock, conveying the passing of time. And you end this line with the word, “cruel.” It nails home the possibility of these Filipino immigrants never returning home. In terms of craft, how do you choose the best techniques for expressing your themes? Or the concerns of your speakers?

Okay. Yeah, because you’re thinking about repetition. How do I choose forms? I think it happens intuitively, at first. It’s not something that is often planned. So, sometimes, like I told you, I really like forms and constraints. Sometimes I go to the blank page, and I’m like, I don’t know where I want to go today. So, I’m going to start with this constraint. And then I’ll go from there and see where it takes me. But then other times, I will have an idea. So, in this poem, I wanted to write about my experience living in Germany, specifically, there was an experience that my family had driving through the Black Forest. My parents were being chased by skinheads, giving them the middle finger and driving by them and kind of scaring them. I was there too, but I don’t remember that, well, because I was so little. It started with that idea and that image, and then it moved into this exploration of our general experience. Going to the Asian stores and buying shrimp paste, and so on. I didn’t think it was going to be a prose poem. I wrote it as a lineated poem first. And then it became a prose poem, for some reason, but it all happened intuitively for that piece. Other times, I do think like, oh, I want to write a pantoum. And I remember that last line. Actually, I remember editing that last line.

Poetry has a lot of forms. Sonnets. Haikus. Odes. How do you incorporate or use form in your poems?

Yeah. So, form for me, is extremely generative. I often begin with form as a way to enter a poem. And sometimes I have an idea in mind. For example, in my second collection, Leaving Biddle City, I have several, prose pantoums. So, the collection is made up of those prose poems, these blocks of text rather than the lineated poem. And I have several poems that are prose pantoums. A pantoum is a poem that is made of four-line stanzas and the second and the fourth line of the first stanza becomes the first and the third line of the following stanza. It has that continuous repetition throughout. I wanted to use that form, because it always makes me think about memory and the cyclical nature of memory. And the way that if you have traumatic memories, that they flashback and sometimes they become new in the context of the experience you’re having that causes the flashback, right? And so, the book is about memory and forgetting and also repetition and also revision. That’s why I wanted that form to play such a central role in the collection. There are times where I am very intentional about the form because I want the form to reflect the themes of the collection. And then other times, I just use forms as a way to begin the poem.

What do you struggle with in your poetry?

It’s really hard to put together a collection of poetry. You write a lot, and then you try to find the threads within your writing, that will become a book. Sometimes, your writing doesn’t come together in that way. It can be hard to see what poems need to be added to your work, or what poems would help you to build a collection. When I was in my MFA program, my thesis was all over the place. It had all of these different kinds of voices. I was experimenting and playing a lot, which is what you should be doing in your MFA. But I didn’t end up with a very clear and unified thesis. I ended up sending that book out a few times, but I didn’t feel very confident about it. It just didn’t feel like a book to me. And so, I think putting together a manuscript can be really challenging. It can be really fun too, but also really challenging. So, for my second collection, I had a project in mind with this book, but then I still feel like it’s incomplete. Even with All Heathens I feel like that. I wish that I’d added this or I wish I’d written more poems about Enrique of Malacca. That always comes to mind to me. Why didn’t I write more about Enrique?

Readers get the finished product. They don’t see the constant drafts poems often go through. Which poem in your collection did you revise the most?

In All Heathens, I revised the longer poem called “Some Words of the Aforesaid Heathen Peoples.” That poem is very personal, but also was really hard to write because I was really trying to incorporate some language from Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of Magellan’s voyage. That poem was a response to a list of words called Some Words of the Aforesaid Heathen Peoples. That is a glossary of the words Antonio Pigafetta translated, from Cebuano, which is my family’s language. When I was reading the chronicle, I just felt distant from the descriptions of the people who are from the same region as my family. Culturally, it’s just very different. That was almost, like 500, almost 600 years ago. I didn’t find anything familiar about it. But then once we got to the language part, I was like, oh, this is, like, where I come from. These are my ancestors, right? And so, I wanted to write a poem that really responded to that feeling I had when I was reading the chronicles. It was really hard to figure out what form the poem needed to take. What ideas I wanted to have in it. And I ended up thinking more about how do I add to this archive. How do I add to this archive with my own family history? My grandmother has never been written into history. And so how do I write about her and write about my mother’s memories of her and include it in this poem? It was a really challenging poem for those reasons. 

Which poets influenced you the most?

In terms of my early writing, I was reading a lot of New York School poetry, because I was working with this writer named Diane Wakoski at Michigan State University. I was an undergraduate student. And I took two of her workshops. I workshopped with her after she retired. She would have people over her house. We would drink tea and workshop each other’s poems. She would encourage us to read different collections. One collection she had us read was Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. It resonated with me. I loved that he was able to incorporate the ordinary and also a lot of humor into his work. I feel strongly influenced by the New York School, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler. And it’s always weird to me that, that’s where I started as a poet. But I also have Filipino American influences that are not only poets. One writer that I really love and who was the reason why I wrote this collection is Mia Alvar. She wrote a story collection called In The Country, which is really great. And of course, I love the way I grew up. I loved the work of Jessica Hagedorn and Gina Apostol. These are fiction writers. Actually, Jessica Hagedorn is also a poet and playwright, I believe so.

Many of the poems in your collection have been published in magazines. Which poem from your collection accumulated the most rejections?

Which poem got the most rejection? Oh, well, you know what? The poem that I said was my favorite, “Elegy for Your Master,” never got published. For some reason, I think it didn’t stand alone very well. 

Is there anything you wish you were asked about your work?

People don’t ask me a lot about the ideas surrounding belief and doubt in the collection. In my earlier drafts of All Heathens, a big part of it was an exploration of my own faith or lack thereof. And how I grew up extremely religious, extremely Catholic. And how I’ve pushed away from that faith because of how intensely devout my family was growing up. And I think the reason why is because one poem was removed from the collection. I was so relieved that the poem was removed because it was very personal. And I was really worried about my parents. They read my collection immediately after it was published. I was so worried that they would read the poem and we would get into a fight about it. It was actually a poem where I was apologizing to my father, asking him forgiveness, for not wanting to be Catholic anymore. That’s a big theme in the collection I don’t often get asked about.

Jerome Newsome is a staff editor of Barely South Review. He is a graduate student at Old Dominion University. He is pursuing an MFA with a focus on Fiction. Some of his work can be found in Vestal Review and The Gateway Review.