& Then #18
Sean Cho A.
Sean Cho A. is a Visiting Professor of Instruction at a Midwestern Regional University. He is also the EIC of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and Thought, which is open for submissions for their Fall 2024 issue.
Why Taylor Loved This Poem:
I love the way this poem gets in the reader’s face. The line “can you look us in the eyes/and say you are not people” is both “in your face” and earnest in a way that I’m still thinking about. It’s vulnerable and intimate to look in someone’s eyes, but this poem is shying away from a gentle intimacy and pushing toward a fierce one.
The setting of this poem also enthralled me. It’s giving us a little slice of life, but with that slice, we as readers are intuiting a lot about the world of the poem. I think most of us understand a world in which this poem is very very real, very tangible.
Also, come on, dinosaur bones reference? I’m all in.
Interview with Sean Cho A.
What made you submit to Team Taylor?
Ha! Well, first I'll say congrats on creating this awesome literary space. BRAWL is a really innovative concept for the literary journal ecosystem. The vibe is great (it reminds me of the retro indie lit scene), but also it has me thinking a lot about reader response theory, and all that other reception studies grad school jargony stuff.
It was a tough call in the brawl between Taylor and Martheaus, but Taylor, I really liked your statement on the interest in "Poems about all the things we inherit from our varying cultures"; that language-d my own interests really well.
Also, Taylor mentioned in A Conversation With The Co-Founder’s that Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf was one of her go-to collections and, like - retweet! His poem “Personal Inventory: Fearless (Temporis Fila)”, was my original gateway into poetry, before that I didn’t really know contemporary poetry was a thing.
Talk to me about the origin of this poem. What spurred you to write this?
I never aim to write to/wards anything. I think my ideal personal poetics would somehow abandon all about-ness. I'm not even sure if I understand what that would feel like, but I'm certain that I want to feel whatever that is.
Which is to say this poem fails to achieve this state of about-less-ness. It has some obvious touchstones, but I also think the need for narrative is for the reader, and not the poem.
I noticed some of the poems in the packet you submitted were numbered. Are you writing a series/bigger project? What does that look like and how does this poem fit within that?
I pretty much only write in long sequences now. I'm one of those annoying writers who needs structure and constraint in order to write. It probably has to do with working for some sense of doneness.
Sadly for my academic career, I'm more of a poem-writing poet than a book-writing poet. I was just listening to The Commonplace Podcast with Rachel Zucker in conversation with D.A. Powell, and he was talking about how we are in the era of "The Cult of The Book", and that really stuck with me.
I think the way we talk about poetry is in books, but the way we think about poetry is in poems.