Interview with You Li :: Creative Humans
Spotlighting poetry on elusive feelings and the criminal legal system
Welcome to Creative Humans (formerly Creative Fridays), a feature of On Humanity to engage and inspire readers to create new things and share your own creative journeys. The following was one of several email interviews I conducted in early 2021 and originally published in the HiH magazine. Note that recently one of You Li’s poems, “Love Letter from the End of Summer,” was featured as Poem of the Week by Narrative. You can read it here.
If you’d like to be interviewed on anything you do for inspiration — or know someone who might — please reach out by replying to this email.
You Li is a lawyer and poet who was born in Beijing and lives in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins, THE BOILER, Shenandoah, Poetry South, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere.
Can you tell us a bit about your writing pursuits?
I write poetry.
What inspired you to create poetry in the first place, and what keeps you motivated these days? What themes are you most passionate about?
I’d always loved writing and reading. I was born in China, where (old) poetry is widely taught at a young age. I memorized my first Tang Dynasty poems in pre-school and loved to write my own poems growing up. I returned to writing poems as an adult when I read Michael Dickman’s book End of the West in college. It excited me because it showed that poetry can drive down into seemingly impenetrable cores and explore complex emotions in a revelatory or cathartic way. Those poems were like jewels that refract light in different directions as you turn them and at the same time they were the light that made the jewel beautiful to look at. I write primarily to figure out certain elusive feelings, about family and love relationships, and about the legal system.
What does your planning process look like? Is spontaneity a key element of your poem writing?
Often, lines or ideas come to me. I keep notes, and later, I build out the poem when I think of or happen upon something else that I want to hold up against the first thing, to see how they relate. Sometimes I write poems that start from “found” texts -- in that case, I explore what grabbed my attention in the text I read and try to explore from there. You can read more about one of these poems here: https://shenandoahliterary.org/thepeak/on-domestic-violence-arrest-white-male-camper-in-cedar-ridge-ii/
Do you employ feedback of any kind in your work? What considerations do you use to determine that a poem is complete?
For years I have had a workshop with friends. I’m pretty lucky to have people who can see new pieces in the context of much of my body of work. It’s hard to tell when a poem is complete, but usually when I feel comfortable stopping work on a poem when it is able to show me something new or surprising.
How do you go about publishing or publicizing your writing? Is there a routine you default to or an avenue you have yet to explore?
I send poems to magazines from time to time. While literary magazines serve an important function and bring brilliant new work into the world, I’d love to reach more audiences who don’t themselves identify as writers by publishing outside of “literary” spheres.
Has the pandemic affected your creative work and/or output? If so, how?
The pandemic has changed my relationship to time. Having more time in many ways, I expected to take advantage of this period to produce more. Having more time, though, changed my orientation to it. I’m prone to giving more time to letting poems mature on their own, in my head or in the world, while trying out more new things.
Are you currently working on any particularly exciting project(s), literary or otherwise?
I’ve been working on a project that takes a wide-angle lens look at the criminal legal and prison systems in the United States, in their vastness and depravity. I work, by day, as a lawyer. Through this work, I encounter texts—court cases, interrogation transcripts, and words said “on the record”—that are publicly available, yet obscured from public view by nature of their volume and apparent impenetrability. I incorporate these texts as found material and use my experiences as inspiration in my poems.
How can readers of this Issue help your work(s) reach a larger audience?
I’d love for you to read my poems! And I’d love to hear what you think. I currently use my Instagram (@gentlegrid) to share poems.
If you’d like your work or thought process to be featured in this publication in a future Creative Humans post, or know someone who might, please reply directly to this email or share it with others. Please consider inviting your friends or collaborators to this publication or participating in the anyhumans podcast as a guest or host.