Chen Chen & Celestial Introspection

By Mason Rowlee

Featured at the Poetic Justice Institute’s 2021 festival, poet guide Chen Chen (陳琛) shared a prompt with the event’s attendees that asked them to imagine a celestial body that consumes them with happiness. In his own work, Chen imagines the celestial in regard to the familial, creating poetry with a reverence for personal reflection. 

Chen Chen, a New York-based poet and activist, has received numerous accolades, including the Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. Published in 2017, his debut poetry book, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” was long-listed for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. 

Chen’s work investigates the love between parent and child, the evolving immigrant experience of Asian Americans, and what it means to be openly queer at the intersection of these identities. At this intersection, found between the thought-provoking lines of Chen’s free-verse poetry, he hopes to create a space that celebrates poetic expression and activism, coinciding with the Poetic Justice Institute’s mission.

One of his most recent poems “The School for the Unschoolable,” published by Poetry in March 2021, dissects the inter-personal pedagogy between parents and children, as well as society and individuals. Through contrasting images of the natural world and his narrator’s playful gestures, Chen articulates the intersections of these lessons regarding queerness and liberation with camp-filled intimacy. 

Beginning with images of anarchy and rebellion in natural spaces, Chen’s narrator transitions into praising his mother’s garments, whose status as a “fashion icon” is more “iconoclast” than anything imagined on the page. As the narrator’s mother transcends the page, the narrator tells the reader to “prove my doubt,” as the irreverent becomes real, and culminates in the playful images of a “heterophobic” sun. Shining in the center of the poem, this sun—a clever pun that compresses the narrator’s queerness and relationship with his mother into a literal shining beacon of the poem—navigates into a melancholy reality. 

In each line, the natural world of suns and stars becomes compounded with symmetrical images of a mother and son connected at heart but light years apart. In this theme of apparent closeness with extenuating physical boundaries, readers witness the staggered stanzas, which symbolize the physical barriers to closeness and access in relationships between queer youth and their families. 

In an interview with Urvashi Bahuguna of the Los Angeles Review of Books, Chen discussed his relationship with his parents and how it manifests in his poetry: “Certain issues between me and my parents do remain unresolved, and these issues have their roots in events from the past. Currently I’m interested in writing about the relationship I have with my parents as an adult – and what I’d like the relationship to be now. This is a trickier subject, perhaps, because I don’t have the benefit of hindsight. What I can see is what’s unfolding in the moment, right in front of me.”

And on this difficult subject, Chen’s writing pulls the reader’s attention both through and beyond the page, intricately unearthing the messiness of this love and openness. As the title may suggest, we are all students falling again and again into mistakes that are simply “unschoolable,” and the physical distance between us is arbitrary next to the closeness at heart. 

In a broader sense, “The School for the Unschoolable” allows Chen to poetically unpack the relationships between queer people and their families. The physical world is compressed alongside the relationships of queer people, which—although seperated by stanza and spacing—are intimate and wildly complex. Chen’s reverence for the beauty of intersectional queerness shines in his humor, but is made real by the universality of love that he feels for his mother. 

In this universality, readers understand that the space between two celestial bodies, such as the sun and the Earth, is not distinct from the relationship between mother and son. By bringing these relationships together in his poem, Chen articulates the complexities of identity and family in naturally flowing, introspective poetry. 

For more on Chen Chen and his poetry, visit his website.