An Interview with Kimiko Hahn
In October of last year, Northwestern was honored with the presence of poet extraordinaire Kimiko Hahn. This fall, we are celebrating the publication of her The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems, released from W. W. Norton & Company on October 15, 2024.
Born in New York, Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program at Queens College, CUNY. Her work embraces themes of intersectional identities, motherhood, longing, and familial ties. Hahn, born to a Japanese-American mother and German-American father, is responsible for reintroducing the zuihitsu (a Japanese lyric prose poetic form) into the Western canon. Personally, as a poet myself, I have found that the form continues on in young marginalized poets today.
Between one-on-ones with graduate students and a reading in Northwestern’s Hagstrum Room, I was able to sit down with Kimiko and pick her mind about zuihitsu and grief writing.
Lydia Abedeen: Tell me about the trajectory zuihitsu has taken in your life.
Kimiko Hahn: Since I wrote my first zuihitsu, "The Downpour" (it's in my collection Mosquito and Ant) for a millennium celebration of The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, and since the publication of my collection The Narrow Road to the Interior, my thoughts have evolved. I began writing zuihitsu using my reading experiences (in translation).
At the time, there was no guide on how to write one, or even a clear definition. I see now that my early attempts were explorations and probably took inspiration from the Modernists and the collage. Now, I want to pull back, in part because I think my work has given other writers permission to do whatever they want and call it a zuihitsu. No. First, one must apprentice themselves not to my work but to the Japanese classics.
The latter are Sei Shōnagon, Makura no Sôshi (The Pillow Book, completed in 1002), Kamo no Chômei, Hôjôki (An Account of My Hut, 1212), Yoshida Kenkô, Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, completed in 1332). Later, with the rise of the merchant class during the Edo period, there was increased popularity.
LA: Many forms come with expectations and/or obligations for not just the reader, but also the writer. For example, a poet may embark upon composing a sonnet thinking it will be a romantic venture. What does the zuihitsu expect from its writer?
KH: I think a zuihitsu expects a mind that is open to exceptional subjectivity that is presented in a list or text that has an organizing theme or subject. Having said that, such a theme is not always the case, but often enough to be a guide.
I hasten to add that subjectivity is not the same as confessional writing. I think it's closer to candor or authenticity.
LA: Some say that a prose poem can be a zuihitsu, and that it does not matter if you name it so. Is it important that a zuihitsu name itself? What is the difference?
KH: I have not heard such a statement. That opinion is an erroneous and a culturally reckless assumption. Of course, it matters what someone names something. Which is why I am evolving my own definition.
LA: Do you have advice for those coming into the form?
KH: As I said earlier, first one should apprentice themselves not to my work but to the Japanese classics. That said, I think I wrote a decent article for American Poetry Review called "The Zuihitsu and the Toadstool.”
LA: I came to the zuihitsu form through your writings about your mother as a mother yourself. What was that experience like? Did you ever feel like a voyeur of your own life?
KH: Thank you. I think "Cuttings" is pretty close to a zuihitsu. I'm pleased with that attempt.
Voyeur? Interesting. I hope I look from the inside and not through a window or into a mirror. That metaphor is not exactly true for me. On the other hand, in working on The Ghost Forest: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2024), I have had to return to work that I wrote decades ago. I've decided to allow myself to mentor that younger self. To make some edits. To excerpt longer pieces. I want to be compassionate and allow her to have her craziness but to instruct her in craft.
LA: What is the zuihitsu's relationship to grief? To the emotions it evokes?
KH: I don't know if the zuihitsu is connected to an emotion the way the sonnet is connected to love or the villanelle to loss. I guess I'd say, again, the quality of candor. And that impulse is very freeing.
Read one of Hahn’s latest works below:
Even after a tumultuous divorce
by Kimiko Hahn
Even after a tumultuous divorce, one should not toss or burn all photos from the marriage. Moments have arrived when I wondered if a birthday cake filling was raspberry or chocolate-cream. Whether there were decorations--although Mom and Dad never would buy figurines because they considered them corny. Or, what one did when a three-year-old did not want to be hugged but cried out when I tried to leave her room. (Not that there's a photo of tantrumming.) But the wedding gown, the groom's tie, the mother-in-law's corsage. None of these moments have fallen away, but if they do in the future, I know I'll wish for an image to jolt the synapses. Recollect nerves.
You can learn more about Hahn's writing and work at kimikohahn.com.
