Congratulations on winning our contest! Your poem was a favorite of our readers. I think that’s because it’s so engaging. Each line is a turn — a thread of the dress — which makes the poem flowing and rewarding. I find its statements dreamlike and biting — a postcapitalist cultural critique of institutions we can’t escape, including “rooms” of gender, endless labor, economy, and geography.

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The speaker becoming a lake at the end of the poem, meanwhile, feels like intentional transcendence. I am curious about why or how you chose “a lake,” and what might be the significance of the natural space to the aims of the poem?

 

At first, I thought that I would end with the speaker putting the dress on and becoming a room, being absorbed into the systems of gender and labor you describe, but I started to wonder what would happen if they took the dress off and how they’d be changed by that process. I see that moment as actually somewhat pessimistic, since wearing the dress for any span of time changes the speaker completely, so I tried to think of the “natural” or not-manmade equivalent to a room, and what I landed on was a lake, since it also has a (somewhat) clear edge, and in SoCal, often exists as a concrete-walled reservoir, basically a room. The speaker’s escape is partial — they’re still an object, and I wanted to kind of force a reader to feel themselves deciding that this is a “better objectification.” There’s also a kind of contamination happening; in their effort to escape, the speaker brings the language of labor and extraction to the external world.

 

I see parallels between your chapbook, Slow Tapping to Help You Sleep [ASMR], and “Owing.” I read the chapbook twice and was surprised and mesmerized each time by your great use of repetition. It doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the realism of anxiety/analysis and added layers of interpretation — both in the poetic sense and in the everyday ways a mind can fixate.

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The chapbook pays attention to the physical and the sensory, with medicine and ASMR being a reprieve, in varying degrees of success, from harsh, uneasy forms of violence. One of my favorite images of this was the floodlights endlessly glaring to display a property line, and the powerlessness and insomnia that conjures.

 

I’m glad you appreciated the repetition! It was a huge facet of the chapbook by the end. Even though the number of times a line was repeated varied, deliberately out of my control (I wrote a little python script to do it for me), the knowledge that a line could be repeated totally changed how I thought of the right and left margins. I love enjambment, and repetition was a surprisingly good companion to it.

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I was aiming for a sense of quiet, like the soft, recitative tone in “Owing.” To me, repetition usually feels punchy and energetic on the page, but I’m using it here not so much for emphasis or semantic saturation as for a recitation/ritualized exhaustion. It’s the dragging momentum of having to keep going when you’re exhausted. And in “Owing,” that came out because I drafted it at the end of a poem-a-day challenge with friends. I was creatively drained and all I could think about was rent, so I started with that, and kept trying to get to the next line.

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This was about a year ago now, in Spring 2023, so I was also thinking about the UC graduate union strike, and how my salary goes right back into UCLA when they pay me.

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The repetitive tone for me is also about getting snagged on these material problems. I don’t think I’m a very imaginative person, in that a little physical discomfort or sensory input drags me right back into my immediate surroundings, and with the ASMR chap, I just leaned into that. The property line is because there’s literally a security light on the lawn across the street from my apartment that can probably be seen from space, and can for sure be seen from my apartment, even with the shades drawn.

 

Though different poems repeat that a given roleplay situation would be unbearable “irl,” my first impression of ASMR was that it is a false substitute, limiting development toward experiences in nature, in the body, with others. You unpack this in many ways and note the influence of the pandemic on loneliness. Directly:

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“ASMR blurs the lines between labor and sleep, between care and consumption, between digital embodiment and personal connection.

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Notably, a large part of the ASMR genre involves downplaying the extent to which ‘money [is being] charged for goods and services].’ A lot of the videos frame this care as casual and personal — a friend doing your makeup.

Other videos end up being … commentaries on the violence of the medical field.

They offer glimpses into idealized appointments where doctors ask for consent before touching patients, where everything is already paid for and insurance is never mentioned.” (Page 7)

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This is interesting and heartbreaking, and made me think about how starved many of us are for community, meditation, and everyday healing. Substance abuse and extreme isolation, for example, also happen when people want to experience something that “allows you to stop existing” (10) or a sense of “what you have in front of you will be enough” (11) to “dull something you want dulled” (28). I thought it was also interesting that the animal (cat) of page 12 refused to be soothed, framing ASMR as a purely human fixation and suggesting we are flawed in our approach.

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On the other hand, maybe like “recovery is a critical praxis” (page 6), ASMR can be a positive practice, not just a balm, and introduce some viewers to needs they didn’t know they are neglecting.

 

I have the same problem about ASMR that I have about a lot of art objects, which is that I’ll enjoy them on my “own time,” (?) but when I clock into critical or creative work, I suddenly feel antagonistic, like mitts up. I listen to ASMR to fall asleep or untangle a bout of sensory overload, so I feel like I have some kind of allegiance or fealty to it because of my own dependence on it, but when I have to write, I become deeply skeptical and mistrusting.

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And that came up in the project because on the one hand, I see ASMR as an exciting aesthetic project, and on the other hand, I think it can be distraction, a way to get notice our own needs by tuning out all others. Which is a long way of saying I think ASMR is, as you say, a balm, not a long-term fix for systemic isolation and despair, but a good aesthetic field for exploring care, exhaustion, and isolation in new forms.

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It's definitely not a replacement for “real” life. I think of it as a whole other kettle of fish. One of my friends, the scholar Andrea Acosta, is doing some great work on digital embodiment as an extension and reworking of embodiment, not the same, not a substitute, and as extension, ASMR comes with the same problems built in — problems of labor, racialized and gendered expectations around care work. The closest comparison for me is lyric poetry (RIP Keats, you would’ve loved ASMR), because the creators direct this incredibly specific, intimate address to an open-ended you. It isn’t the same kind of intimacy as trading dinner for a haircut from a friend, but neither is lyric poetry. And I think reading poetry alongside ASMR helps bring some of the weirdness and discomfort of poetry back into focus for me, too.

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I’d have a hard time saying if it’s a positive phenomenon, though — I often get stuck going back and forth between finding its approaches to embodiment and rest fascinating and seeing in it a kind of art that could only exist in this broken, extractive version of the world. The chapbook can’t make up its mind either, and that hesitation, that unwillingness to love or condemn something, underwrites a lot of the poems.

 

The chapbook examines intimacy, often at platonic levels, and again, I think reaches toward transcendence — growing via complexity of objectification beyond the anxiety the first poem establishes. Putting the least clinical forms of touch at the end of the collection was mixed with a move past “usefulness” that I really related to.

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The body as an object is the theme of several poems. It makes me wonder if poetry’s common obsession with “the clear image” is a subconscious seeking of inaction, toward simply being. A “totalizing surrender” (10). A flurry of thoughts toward thoughtlessness — a place poetry does not often go. The final poem, “Auto Elegy,” brought to mind death as the true form of rest — yet even that can be counted and documented. At that point, I could no longer distinguish between what was “the recorded ASMR” and what was “really happening.” Could you say more about your intent for that poem in closing the chapbook?

 

Part of my emphasis on the body as an object, which for me is synonymous with the self as object, is my ongoing sense of not being a real person or a good person (whatever that means), of being slightly outside the outlines of the human, and I’m curious how we can distort or escape the self, how we think about other things. ASMR became a productive way to explore what limits to selfhood look like in the interior, in me alone, at rest, so as deep into stillness as I could go. I think when I’m looking for totalizing surrender or simply being, I’m trying to shift sideways and feel my own porousness, the limits and edges of me.

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For the chapbook, the last poem is very much an ekphrastic piece inspired by Josie B’s “Mushroom Decomposes You Fungal Spa” video, wherein they’re the mushroom and you’re a corpse. I love it because they don’t treat death morbidly or with horror (and how could death be morbid for a mushroom?). I think about death a lot — my death, the deaths of people I love and don’t know, planetary death — and I found it unexpectedly comforting to jump past my usual fears around my own death and start with the assumption that I’ve already died. It takes a lot of my usual fretting and handwringing off the table.

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From there, what came into focus was actually the violence of passivity and exhaustion. While most of the rest of the chapbook has also been about passivity as a kind of healing, here the speaker is trawling their interior for more and more passivity, and the logical endpoint was decomposition.

 

The inwardness of illness/recovery, of vulnerability, is also where poetry is – because it has been pushed there by a society that is so often unsafe (“shiver when I walk alone at / night and forfeit my agency…” (31)). Like simulations of commodified yet idealized virtual healing, most of us have time for poetry or other art forms, and even basic safety, only at the fringes of our days:

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“I’m fumbling the format for intimacy: it looks so like exhaustion here.” (21)

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How did writing these poems change your thinking about these topics?

 

The ASMR poems started just before the pandemic, when I was in a deep depression and recovering from an eating disorder, while also barely managing to afford the cost of living in Los Angeles as a graduate student, and whatever people about pain or difficulty making for better poetry, I was stunned at how hard it was for me to create during that time. It was a boring time for me, honestly. The dogged repetition of these poems, especially the ASMR ones, is meant to highlight that vulnerability, the poetry that exists on the edge of and often despite its own tediousness. I think they are most effective as an account of how, when we’re in pain individually and under systems of capital and control, it’s hard to see connection, closeness, and intimacy, and impossible to imagine what they could be, in a different world. So, I find myself having to triangulate these feelings from their negative correlates, like how feelings of love and care get displaced onto anxiety, so you’re worrying about a beloved instead of loving them in the moment.

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“Owing” was kind of a first attempt to go the other way in this reality, to say, ok, if things are unrecognizable, and are so easily mixed-up and swapped out, what does that mean for a poem? Can it hijack the process where systems like rent turn one object into another and do something similar, make that process visible? “Owing” was my way of asking where poetry can warp those systems, and whether it can do that to good effect. It’s also in many ways an elegy to the poem I would’ve written if I hadn’t been a graduate student paying 45% of her salary to her employer for housing.

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Re: changes in my thinking about these topics — with the ASMR poem, I was surprised by how much I found, creatively, when I started writing towards exhaustion, and then once I’d got that out of my system, turning towards “Owing” and other poems, I started to be more playful, and messier in my approach. The ASMR poems are very careful, in a way — they know just when to shrink back into abstraction, or disappear into a vague gesture, and I love that for them, but even if “Owing” is more straightforward on the page, it was a much scarier poem to write because I was writing from a place of anger and active desire, and I felt much more distance from the speaker as I created it.

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