Franny Choi Believes in a Future After the Apocalypse

Alyssa Lo talks with Franny Choi about their most recent poetry collection ‘The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On,’ poetic forms, and speculative possibilities.

I’ve been following Franny Choi’s work for a decade and was thrilled by the announcement of their third book The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. In it, through meditative and expansive lyric, Choi reminds us that the apocalypse is nothing new and has already arrived for many marginalized communities. Poems in the collection span from the Korean War to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, but among these poems of apocalypse, Choi also offers glimpses into brighter futures.

Franny Choi is the author of two previous poetry collections, Soft Science and Floating, Brilliant, Gone, as well as one chapbook, Death by Sex Machine. She is a Kundiman fellow, a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, a recipient of Princeton University’s Holmes National Poetry Prize, and a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Their poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Last month, we spoke about apocalypses, poetic forms, and speculative possibilities. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.

*

Alyssa Lo: The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On is such an evocative title. Could you tell me more about how you arrived at it?

Franny Choi: The title comes from the first poem in the book, which is the one that I ended up building the collection around. The story is that some time after the 2016 election, during a time when it seemed like everything was hurtling toward the end . . . you know, it already seemed that way, then the election seemed to be sending a signal that there’s no turning back, this is the direction that things are heading—toward certain doom. I was very much in the muck of feeling disheartened and deep in despair, and my partner, who is much smarter than me, said this thing to me: “It might be helpful to remember that the apocalypse happened a long time ago and that our people have survived it and have been surviving it for many years.” I think that in saying this, he was sort of quoting Sun Ra, Public Enemy, and a lot of different scholars, particularly Black and Indigenous scholars, thinkers, artists, writers, who have understood that our origin, in so many ways, begins in the calamitous world-ending events of the past. Whether that’s the apocalyptic event of the transatlantic slave trade, war, or the genocide of Indigenous people, all of us here are living our lives in the aftermaths of unfathomably destructive things. So it’s weird, maybe, that this was the thing that brought comfort to me. It helped me zoom out a little bit and understand that attendant to all of these apocalyptic times of history are also unthinkable—and unthinkably inventive—modes of survival. It just helped me to kind of refocus on that. So that’s where the poem came from and then what the book came from as well.

AL: Since this is your third full-length collection—and shoutout to Death by Sex Machine—you’ve been through the editorial process a couple times before. Did anything surprise you during the writing and editorial process this time around, or the publishing process as a whole?

FC: It’s interesting how every book sort of happens differently. With Floating, Brilliant, Gone, it was really me looking at everything that I had and then saying, “Okay, how might I create something that represents me as an artist right now?” With Soft Science, it was very much writing toward a project and around a set of questions. Then with this book, it was a combination of the two. I think with this collection it was like these two different kinds of writers that I’ve been: one that is very interested in speaking to people and understands myself in being deeply rooted in community, and also a kind of writer that’s really interested in the conceptual and trying to write at the end point of my abilities as an artist. I feel like these two kinds of Franny Choi were able to hold hands in this book in this way.

Also, working with Jenny Xu at Ecco is sort of the closest I’ve ever worked with an editor. Carey Salerno at Alice James Books is an amazing reader of poems, but by nature of the way that that book happened, it arrived to her pretty fully formed. Whereas Jenny saw multiple drafts and really helped me think—not just about the craft within the poems, but also the political thinking that I was trying to work at in this collection. Perpetual shoutout to Jenny!

Attendant to all of these apocalyptic times of history are also unthinkable—and unthinkably inventive—modes of survival.

AL: Based on what you said about these apocalypses happening before, quite a few of the poems in the collection touch upon violence on the Korean peninsula as well as in the United States. For these poems, I’m wondering what the research process looked like. I’m also particularly interested in the “Upon Learning That Some Korean War Refugees Used Partially Detonated Napalm Canisters as Cooking Fuel” sequence.

FC: I both love grounding my creative work in a research process and also often feel intimidated by it, because I am cognizant that I’m approaching it not as a scholar trained in any sort of particular methodology, but as an artist. I say I’m a scholar of nothing but my own weird feelings [laughter]. So sometimes, I worry about whether I’m doing justice to the works that I’m absorbing in the process. But I tell myself that it’s okay to read, learn, and let what I read and learn change me, and then, through that changed self, write.

The work of Grace M. Cho was really instrumental in that whole section of the book where I’m really delving into the sort of world-ending events that are most directly relevant to my family’s history. [That includes] the Korean War and also, prior to that, the end of World War II and the end of Japanese colonial rule of Korea, which also involves the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reading the work of Grace M. Cho—who’s exploring history from a deeply personal and, I would say, poetic approach—was really permission-giving: to approach that history understanding that any sort of record is only going to tell a partial version of the truth anyway, and to take my imperfect methods and my imperfect eye to that work.

For other research, I think that so much of the book was really just, like, watching the news, reading the news, and then feeling really, really shitty. I guess that was a lot of my research process: Reading the news, feeling shitty, writing, and repeat.

AL: Looking more specifically at the collection, you’re someone who I think of as an inventive formalist. That’s evident in the palindrome poem “It Is What It Is” and many others in this collection. Could you say a bit about approaching form in relationship to the apocalypse? Was it any different than how you usually think about form?

FC: Wow, that is a great question. I love it because I haven’t exactly thought about those two concepts in relation to each other. Okay, so I’m going to try and have a new thought [laughter]. In order to get there, I’m going to start with not exactly a new thought. I learned in the process of doing my haphazard research for this book that the word apocalypse—at least in the context of the Judeo-Christian lineage of that word, apokalypsis, the word that apocalypse comes from—just refers to a text that puts an event into a very long view of history in order to reveal something about the present, which is very cool. That’s why the book of Revelation is called “the book of Revelation”—it’s about revealing something about the present moment.

So maybe there’s something about inherited forms where by writing, for example, a sonnet, I can reach back to thirteenth-, fourteenth-century traditions and, by the process of form, do a little bit of time traveling. You know, at least speak a little bit to this older tradition that I come from in order to put that in conversation with the world that I live in now—and, in doing so, reveal something about the present. There are not that many traditional—at least European—forms in the book, but there is a ghazel, there is a sonnet. So maybe it’s kind of a way for me to reach big in the space of this work that I’m doing.

But also, with invented form like that palindrome poem, I think that sometimes [I use form] to write about things that are so much bigger than myself, things that sort of seem impossible to say in words. I can recruit form to do some of the work that I can’t exactly explain, and just sort of create a structure that at least mirrors some of the big, impossible-to-name feelings. That is a way that I’ve found [to say] some of the stuff that feels unsayable to me. I think that’s sort of the way “It Is What It Is” happened—I just couldn’t really think of anything to say. I had felt so much and couldn’t think of anything to say, so I tried to create at least a shape of a poem that would communicate that feeling.

AL: Two other poems that I think about a lot are “Field Trip to the Museum of Human History” and “Dispatches from a Future Great-Great-Granddaughter.” Both of them are situated in the future. The former is one I point to a lot as an example of using the speculative to imagine liberated futures. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on using this genre to create maps for what we can do now in order to build more just worlds.

FC: This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot and continue to find interesting and hard to grapple with. In the years that I was organizing with other people to take power and funds away from the police in the city that I was living in, that was abolitionist work that I was doing, and yet it was very hard for me—or I found a sort of tension—in identifying as an abolitionist. It was really hard for me to imagine a world without police, even though that was the work that I was actively doing. It was so ingrained in the way that I understood the world that I just couldn’t imagine what a world without police could be like—even though I said all the time in public, “I believe in a world without police.”

It was really not until I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s book The Dispossessed—which takes place in an anarchist society where, among other things, they don’t have prisons, cops, or a centralized government that looks like any government I have ever been a subject of—that I was actually convinced, finally, that the world that I was working toward was even possible. It wasn’t because I understood all of the logistics that went into administering that world; it was because I lived there for the span of a novel and I could feel what it felt like to be there. So I wrote [“Field Trip to the Museum of Human History”] after a scene—it’s very closely related to a scene in The Dispossessed—because I wanted to give a little piece of that feeling to the people that I was organizing with. One of the best compliments I’ve ever gotten on any poem I’ve ever written was from a fellow organizer who said, “Wow, you transported me for a moment.”

There are so many things art can do in order to create and build the world that we believe in. Some of that involves simply directing resources to the people who are working on the ground to shift power and build that world. Some of that means fortifying the movement and nourishing it with beautiful things. One of the roles that I’ve been most interested in recently is helping us envision a little bit, in tiny doses at a time, what it might feel like to be free. We’re not policy makers—well, not all of us are, most of us aren’t—so we have the privilege of not having the burden to prove that it’s economically viable in order to create that world. All we have to do is transport people there for a little bit, and I know that is powerful and impactful because it was impactful to me and it shifted the trajectory of my life. A piece of literature taught me, briefly, what it felt like to be free. That is the tiny mission that not all of the poems are on, but some of them are.

AL: On this note of future building, the first Witches & Warriors retreat was held this summer. First, congratulations, and could you say more about what that was like, as well as Brew & Forge?

FC: Brew & Forge is an organization that I started around the same time that I wrote “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On.” It started as, and continues to be, an annual book fair where authors donate copies of their books and collectively choose a grassroots, direct action-based organization to support using the funds from this one- to two-week book sale. We’ve raised almost twenty-five thousand dollars just by having people send each other books in the mail over the last six years. That has been a really beautiful small but concrete way of bolstering grassroots movements by mobilizing artists.

And then the Witches & Warriors retreat, yeah! It was really amazing! [Laughter.] We brought together six poets, organizers, activists, and movement builders, for three days in the beautiful countryside with two amazing faculty members, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Cynthia Dewi Oka. It was three days of skill sharing and writing workshops and discussions and collective dreaming and karaoke and singing songs by a campfire. It was so beautiful. I actually think that work with Brew & Forge and this book are two parts of the same sort of puzzle, so I’m glad to be able to talk about it while talking about this book because they’re related, they’re sisters.

AL: I really love—and have received books from—Brew & Forge! It’s wonderful hearing more about the retreat because it sounds like an incredible space of dreaming “What can we do?” while also allowing these organizers to rest after all the on-the-ground work they’ve been doing.

FC: Yeah! That importance of rest is a lesson we just keep learning over and over and I, specifically, keep learning over and over because it’s really easy to forget how important it is and how needed it is. Just recently we were having some conversations about the next year of Brew & Forge and what we’re going to do. And I was like, “We’re going to do this and that, we’re going to do this project and that project,” and I had a whole list, and everybody was sort of like, “What if . . . we slow down?” [Laughter.] It’s weird to chill and have some space to rejuvenate and feed our minds and bodies, and have that be a thing that you have to constantly battle for, but it’s just true.

A piece of literature taught me, briefly, what it felt like to be free.

AL: What advice do you have for writers—people—trying to get through this time, and what have you been doing to take care of yourself during this time?

FC: Oh my god. Yeah. It’s hard because speaking to what I just said about the battle we have to engage in in order to actually nourish ourselves, it’s also so real when it comes to writing. I have personally found it to be sometimes dangerous to think of my writing as another way of being productive: produce writing, produce words, produce art. That can sometimes lead to a really damaging relationship to my own art, which is one of the most precious relationships in my life. And it was especially damaging when it went, “Oh, I need to produce and the thing that I produce needs to bring me X, or then create X.” It fucking sucks. Yet, to create work is the thing that fortifies me and makes me feel like I am living my life.

I don’t know what advice I really have except to say that if writing and creating work is the thing that makes your life meaningful, livable, vibrant, nourished, and good, protect it at all costs, whether that means not doing other kinds of work or doing less of other kinds of work. Everything in the world is conspiring to make it so we cannot feed our souls and each other’s souls with our art, so we have to spend a lot of energy protecting that. [Laughter.] I feel like that’s really intense and I don’t mean it to be so paranoid, but it’s true. Capitalism will do everything it can to take it away from us, and we can’t let it.