Over 60 students and faculty gathered in the intimate event space of NE Campus College Hall to listen to gay Asian-American poet Chen Chen read his poetry for the Living Literature event put on by the English department on March 25.
As Chen read a selection of poems, the room was filled with various reactions, from laughs to tears. His poetry focuses on various topics including reflections on a trip to the zoo and memories of complicated immigrant experiences.
“I found it really inspiring,” NE student Kinsley Carter said. “I liked the connection between mundane, regular life events and extremely personal things, and how that makes it universal to anyone and easy to digest.”
Carter also wants to pursue poetry but hesitates to share vulnerable emotions with an audience.
After the event, she asked Chen what she could do to get over this fear, and he recommended going to an open mic to perform.
“I feel like that could help, because it’s a lot easier to talk to a bunch of strangers than your friend or your parents,” Kinsley said.
Chen has two published books, “When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities” and “Your Emergency Contact Is Experiencing An Emergency.” He has won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award.
Chen uses his poetry to touch on issues in groups that have been historically marginalized and hopes his words will make people feel less alone in their struggles, the way poetry and literature did for him.
“It would mean a great deal to me if my work could do that for someone else,” he said. Carter is part of the LGBTQ+ community herself and said Chen’s boldness in talking about his identity was appreciated.
“I loved having a queer person up there speaking about the cycles of acceptance and non-acceptance,” she said. “It’s a little scary right now to try to be a writer. It’s very hard for people to take you seriously.”
The following day, Chen was featured at two “craft talks” in NSTU Center Corner where he read work from some of his inspirations including an essay by Jenny Zhang called “How It Feels” and “Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved” by Gregory Orr. The event was held in a bigger event space, so it had almost double the audience of the reading.
In response to a question about the humor in his poems, Chen said it’s an important part of what he hopes to accomplish with his writing.
He often blends humor with sorrow, for example in his poem “Doctor’s Note” he starts it off with “Please excuse Chen Chen from class. He is currently dead.” He follows it up with a casual humorous tone of what killed him and what might bring him back to life, “prescribed long baths in chicken stock.” The tone shifts when he brings up how his parents might react to his “death.” In their voice he says “You’d be better off dead. Better than whatever you are with other men.”
“It’s kind of it’s a coping mechanism,” he said. “It’s a survival technique. It’s creative. That’s where I feel like my poems really come alive, is when I embrace that [humor] even just a little bit.”
In her introduction for Chen, NE associate professor Rebecca Balcarcel presented the question of whether poetry matters in today’s world. She argued it is important because in the way it encapsulates the human condition and the mastery over language.
Poetry isn’t specifically constructed just to make you feel stupid when you read it with old language or difficult text,” she said. “I think instead, we all have experiences that make us want to capture them or investigate them, and the poems are how humans have done this.”
After seeing the reaction Chen had on the crowd, Carter hopes to make someone feel that way with her work in the future.
“The passion of it, sharing yourself in a moment where you feel alone, having a room of people crying over your pain,” she said. “It makes you feel like a community, like you’re making a difference.”
