Kim Ramos

KTQ: We are a history focused journal, so we’d love to start off with a bit about your history. Can you tell us about your background?

KR: Yes! I feel that my background and familial history is a strange and wonderful convergence. I was born and raised in Southern Missouri, about 2 hours south of the dairy farm where my mother grew up.
Like her, I am a Missouri girl—float trips, bonfires, the goodbyes that last an hour at the door. My father, though, was born in the Philippines and emigrated to the US when he was still a baby. He moved every few years as a child because his father, my Lolo, was in the Air Force. This branch of my familial history is both familiar and foreign to me—I know the taste of pancit, but not of sugarcane fresh from a roadside vendor. I know the joy of superstition, but not of the feel of Tagalog across my tongue. Altogether, my familial history is combinatorial, in-between, maybe even curious—but beautiful, regardless.

KTQ: How do you think this curiosity, or this experience of being between worlds (belonging and not belonging), works its way into your poetry?

KR: In undergrad, I had a truly exceptional poetry teacher, Maria Miranda Maloney. She introduced me to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work on liminality just opened something in me. I love that Anzaldúa conceives of liminality as a place where multiple cultures, languages, and modes of thought clash, overlap, and fuse. It’s close to alchemy. Though much of Anzaldúa’s experience diverges from mine, Borderlands/La Frontera gave me the concepts and language to begin thinking about my familial history as a site of conflict, celebration, and chemistry. She put words to feelings I had had my whole life.

Being between worlds—living in liminality—feels fragile, insubstantial, at the same time that it feels grounded, robust. There’s a story that my parents used to tell me, sometimes as a joke, sometimes as a word of caution: When I was a baby, my white mother would take me in to see my father at work. The other employees knew that I was my father’s child—he was the only Asian man working there—but they thought that my mom was the nanny! Other times, people asked my mother if I was adopted, given that we look so little alike. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how stories like this structure and shape my understanding of myself, my family, and what it means to belong in America—and maybe more pointedly, the price of acceptance, the complicit sins we take on.

Anzaldúa is very adamant, though, that for all of the tension and conflict of living in liminality, there is a limitless joy that comes with it. I try not to forget that joy. I wrote a poem about my mother a few years back that celebrated the places where our appearances diverge, and the places where our appearances converge—I have been told that the older I become, the more that I look like my mother.

KTQ: And what about process? What is your process like? How does a poem begin for you?

KR: I start with a concept, and then I see where it leads! For instance, I loved this quote from Heather Corinna’s piece, “An Immodest Proposal”: “We have the endlessly tiresome arguments based in Darwinian theory or biochemistry trying to show us that this absence of women’s pleasure in the equation of sex has nothing to do with social conditioning or gender status, but with the ‘fact’ that women do not actually experience real, physical desire.”

The notion of absent desire, which I visualized as a large black hole in a health textbook, really stood out to me. Around that same time, I was reading Katie Schmid’s poetry collection, Nowhere, and I was completely taken in by her series of poems entitled“The Boys of the Midwest.” Then it all just clicked. OK, what is it like to be a “Girl of the Midwest?” How is our relationship to pleasure, romance, sex, and love complicated by the Protestant conservative culture in which many of us were brought up? Corinna and Schmid got me to think more about sexual pleasure as a problem of absence rather than as a problem of shame. It’s not so much that the “Girls of the Midwest” are afraid to talk about sex and pleasure, but that they don’t have the language to do so. The resulting poem was an attempt to carve out that language, to conceptualize feminine pleasure.

KTQ: Are there other things you have found that we lack the language for, or times that you have found the boundaries of language constricting? As a writer, do you find these boundaries aggravating or inspiring, or maybe even both?

KR: I love this question. Yes! Coming up against a linguistic boundary is aggravating and inspiring. There’s a philosopher, Miranda Fricker, who writes on this very topic. She describes it as hermeneutical injustice, which is the injustice that a social group suffers when “ a significant area of their social experience [is] obscured from understanding” due to “prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation.” In other words, there is a specific injustice to lacking the language and concepts to make one’s experience intelligible to others, and to herself. Not only does this sort of injustice make it difficult to communicate one’s experiences, it makes it difficult to conceptualize them at all. Before I had the word “liminality,” for instance, I didn’t know how to make sense of this in-betweenness: I had lived in Missouri my entire life, so why did people still assume that I wasn’t from around here?

When we, as writers, come up against a linguistic boundary or gap, we are met with the task of innovation. It feels almost insurmountable: How do we go beyond the language that exists to say what needs to be said? But it can be done. Angie Sijun Lou has a beautiful example of this “going beyond” language in her piece, “Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby:”

“Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on-her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution.”

And from Franny Choi’s “Turing Test:”

“bone-wife / spit-dribbler / understudy for the underdog / uphill rumor / fine-toothed cunt / sorry / my mouth’s not pottytrained / surly spice / self-sabotage spice / surrogate rug burn / burgeoning hamburglar / rust puddle / harbinger of confusion / harbinger of the singularity / alien invasion / alien turned pottymouth / alien turned bricolage beast / alien turned pig heart thumping on the plate //”

I feel so lucky to live in a time where poetry like this is not only being written, but is so accessible. Choi and Lou have given me words to shape and structure my experience. I can only hope that in writing, I am able to do something similar, even if my contribution is small.

KTQ: What is revision like for you? How much does a poem just happen and how much of the writing takes place in editing?

KR: I am a huge proponent of revision—I sometimes find that revisions are more fun than the initial act of writing! I usually come in with some idea of what I want to write and how I want to go about it, so I let that plan take the lead for the initial draft. Then I set it aside and work on other projects. But when I come back to that piece, the real work and fun begins. I see the piece with entirely new eyes: where to trim, what to add, ideas for restructuring or reframing. Sometimes the initial concept is scrapped because I realize that I was really writing about something else. Other times, only a few lines of the poem survive to be used in some future poem. It feels a little bit like making a collage out of magazine scraps. I figure out what to save, what to rework, what to trash, and then if I’m lucky, I’ve got a nice picture or at least some scraps for a future work. Still, there are a few pieces that I’ve written and then decided not to touch again. “o body! o omen!” is one of those pieces, and I feel especially attached to it for that reason—but again, it’s rare that I don’t revise.

KTQ: Unlike most other literary mediums, poetry isn’t just about the words, it’s about form. What do you think the role of form is in poetry? How do you choose what form a poem will take?

KR: I love the work of Franny Choi for their intentional and varied use of form. I think Choi was the first poet I read who wrote prose poems with forward slashes to denote line breaks, and I just fell in love with the ingenuity of that. A piece that approaches you with the expectations of prose, yet surprises you with the unconventional language of poetry, and still finds a way for the end-rhymes not to get “lost” in the block of text? Amazing. I often employ this form when I want to tell a story lyrically.

I love the way that Kaveh Akbar uses form, too. The way he uses periods and space in Pilgrim Bell to denote silence and reverence really heightens the experience of reading his words. That’s the role of form, I think— heighten, deepen, and even complicate the written content through opposition. I find myself drawn to the traditional prose poem, lists, and sonnets, though I try to be intentional in my use of these forms when I do employ them. What sort of story am I trying to tell? How do these images need to be presented to create the desired effect in the reader? Why does it matter that this poem comes to you in a block of text, rather than as a series of stanzas? Which traditions do I engage with when I write a sonnet, versus when I write a list?

Other times, form is a generative exercise. Playing around with sonnets as a nice little puzzle often gets me writing more inventively and creatively than if I were to use free verse. Paradoxically, the constraints on rhyme, syllable, and meter end up liberating my writing.

KTQ: Do you have any themes that you find yourself returning to again and again?

KR: Recently, I’ve been drawn to Filipino folklore as a means of forging and excavating connections to my Filipino heritage, and as a means of revising and complicating what it means to be Asian in the American Midwest. What does it mean to belong to a place? To be from a place? These creatures hail from the Philippines, a country that I have visited only twice as a child, and remember very little. And yet, they feel as if they could live in the dense forest of my backyard, between the penned in fields and creeks. I’ve felt a connection to the Manananggal, a vampiric woman with wings who can split from the waist up. She then uses her status of a femme fatale to lure townspeople and feed on their blood. I, too, have split myself to be loved, to get what I want—should I feel empowered, or monstrous? In Ang-Ngalo, the tireless builder and the son of the Creator, I see my Lolo: a man whose task is never done, who is compelled to work until his existence runs out. In the Moon-Swallowing Monsters, those larger-than-life dragons and serpents, I see my cousins: bright eyed, hungry, wanting the world. I can’t help but return to the beauty and peculiarity of this twinned existence: belonging, and yet being an outsider. Being from here, and yet being a symbol of some other place.

KTQ: Have you found any similarities between Filipino folklore and American folklore? What about any differences that have struck you?

KR: For me, “American folklore” means Catholicism. I was raised Catholic, and my mother grew up in a historically German Catholic area of Missouri. Though I no longer practice it, I’m still drawn to the stories of saints, relics, and miracles—they are something close to superstition. When I was in grade school, I used to carry around a medallion of St. Anthony, the Patron Saint of Lost Things, because I believed that it would prevent me from misplacing my things.

This superstition is strong in Filipino folklore, too. My Lola once told me that dreaming of an ocean means that you, or someone close to you, is pregnant. This used to really worry me when I was in college! I’ve also heard that if you wander a forest, you must turn your clothes inside out so that the creatures of the forest do not lead you astray.

Superstition is, I think, a means of exerting control over an unpredictable world. But it is also a means of expecting more, imagining more, than what you see as an ordinary human. Superstition is a faith in some sort of divinity, and this divinity is close, nearby—in the next room, even. I suppose there are differences between these two folklores, but at the moment, I struggle to identify them. Both traditions deal in rewards for good deeds, retribution for sins, and history-long debts. And both feel, to me, like a sort of promise of something more.

KTQ: Every writer deals with things like writer’s block or rejection at some point. It’s just the unpleasant truth of being creative and putting your creativity out there. Have you experienced these things? Do you have any tools or advice for when these aspects of being a writer come up?

KR: Behind every published poem is a heaping pile of rejections. Maybe there are a lucky few who never experience this, but for most of us, there’s no getting around it. I often think of it like dating: I don’t need to be loved by everyone, but there’s likely a few good matches out there for me. And I’d rather date someone who really likes me! When I receive a rejection, I think of it as narrowing down the field: OK, so no love match here. That’s OK. I’ll keep throwing my work into the world with the optimism of someone who believes in romance.

I’m currently studying philosophy in a PhD program, so the time and mental energy for writing poetry are often very slim. But rather than wallow in my writer’s block, I try to stay alert for phrases and concepts that I can use later when there is more time and energy to make use of them. That’s one of the things I love about writing: it makes you tune in to the world in a really different way.

KTQ: Is there a particular area of philosophy you’re focused on? Do you find the concepts in your studies work their way into your writing?

KR: I haven’t quite figured out my area of study yet, and so my interests are very broad. As of now, though, I’m interested in epistemology, feminist philosophy, and ethics. More particularly, I’m interested in the topic of (sexual) consent. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for consent to take place? Is consent enough to ensure truly ethical, egalitarian sex, or are there further requirements?

The Corinna piece I mentioned earlier was a paper I read for a seminar last spring on feminist philosophy and the philosophy of sex. I find that philosophers often use little turns of phrase that segue well into inspiration for a poem, too. “Ghostly agents” is one that I came across recently while reading Hilary Putnam. But more holistically, I tend to think that the project of philosophy and the project of poetry are not so different—both hope to give clarity to the obscure.

KTQ: Many poets feel like they need to have an MFA to truly be considered a poet. As someone who notably studies philosophy, not literature, do you think it’s important for writers to maintain study or experience outside of the literary world? Why or why not?

KR: I felt some pressure in this direction when I was choosing between an MFA in poetry and a PhD in philosophy. But there are many ways to engage with and come to poetry, and my “dream job” is teaching philosophy in some capacity. I reasoned that becoming a philosopher would, in the end, make me a better poet, too.

I’ll return again to Gloria Anzaldúa. She is a philosopher, a social theorist, and an activist just as much as a poet. Borderlands/La Frontera is a biography, social analysis, and a reconstruction of history interspersed with poems. Even the non-fiction prose sections read like poetry. And so her work in these other disciplines enriches her poetry. I sometimes wonder whether her insights begin as poems or as social analysis—it’s likely they began as both, as two avenues to the same place.

I said before that I begin a poem with a concept. When I read philosophy, I can’t help but look at it with a poet’s eye—I’m always mining, scavenging for the next little kernel of a concept. Having some area of study or experience outside of writing has, at least for me, provided me with endless raw materials. As I continue studying philosophy, I’ve found that poetry has become a source of philosophical insights, too. (For instance, a potential answer to Fricker’s charge of hermeneutical injustice is poetry and the poetic imagination!) I can no longer imagine doing poetry or philosophy separately—both feel so necessary to the other.

KTQ: And our traditional final question— what would you include in your personal poetry canon?

KR:

1. Soft Science, Franny Choi

2. Pilgrim Bell, Kaveh Akbar

3. nowhere, Katie Schmid

4. Ariel, Sylvia Plath

5. Threat Come Close, Aaron Coleman

6. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman