An Interview with Tiana Nobile
Poet Tiana Nobile sat with our Interviews Editor Esteban Rodriguez to discuss her debut poetry collection Cleave (Hub City Press 2021). A powerful book that centers on identity, transnational adoption, familial history and relationships, and the ways in which one chooses to understand the past, Cleave enters the world at a time when poetry such as Nobile’s is needed now more than ever. Although the start of 2021 might have brought with it a renewed sense of faith and hope, uncertainty still remains, and Nobile, with melodic and honest language, provides us the space to examine who we are and who we can be.
Esteban Rodriguez: Cleave, your debut poetry collection, is forthcoming from Hub City Press. Can you speak about the inspiration behind the first poems that led to this book and how the book as a whole came together.
Tiana Nobile: I initially started exploring many of the ideas that appear in the book while I was in college. In my last semester of my last year, I took a workshop with Cathy Park Hong, and it was such a pivotal moment for me as a young adult and an aspiring poet. Cathy’s class expanded my understanding of what it means to be a writer in exile, and this opening enabled me to develop my own exile poetics as a transnational, transracial Korean adoptee in America. After that, I moved to New Orleans and began my career in education, during which time I was barely writing at all. At one point I remember thinking that if I could give up on poetry and focus all my energy on being a teacher, then I should just do that. Ultimately, I couldn’t resist the pull back to the page, and after several years, I quit my job and enrolled in an MFA program. The bulk of the rest of the poems in Cleave happened during this time. I work really well with structure and deadlines. Having exterior pressure to produce new work lit a fire under me, but I wasn’t just writing again; I was writing with intention. I’m still shocked at how much I generated in such a short period of time. I think I was just ready. I had been ruminating on these topics and feelings for so long that once I had the time and space, the poems spilled out of me.
ER: As a former teacher myself, I completely understand the responsibility of the job and how much time it can siphon from writing, especially when writing poems that have such an emotional weight, like those in your collection. In the opening poem “Moon Yeong Shin,” the speaker reveals the following:
Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what’s the difference when your veins are full
of haunting?
Feeling that you had permission to write about the country from which you were adopted, what did it teach you about yourself, your past, and how you should approach your writing?
TN: I think, rather than write about Korea, I wrote into its absence. Poetry became a way for me to dig into this loss, reckon with it, and fill it with something entirely my own. At first, this was really daunting: how does one write into such a void? I began abstractly, and over time, research played an increasingly important role. I began to ask questions and think critically not only about my own story but also about the larger adoption industry. Situating myself in the context of such a complicated history was illuminating and heart-breaking; however, I think it also created many openings for my poems to deepen and to grow.
ER: Were there poems in the collection that had more opportunity for growth as a result?
TN: The one that comes to mind right away is “Revisionist History,” which is the last poem in the book. I wrote a small chunk of it in college, and it sat in a folder for many years untouched. Years later, I read Nox by Anne Carson, which is a remarkable accordion book wherein she mourns the death of her brother through various forms: original poetry, translations, personal artifacts, photographs. After that, rather than seeing absence as a lack, it became a space for possibility.
ER: “Revisionist History” is a remarkable poem, and it ends the collection beautifully and inquisitively. As the speaker states:
What’s
the difference between memory told and memory burned?
I was born in the womb of a stranger, my face a reflection
of somebody else’s shadow. If I told you that I missed you,
would you believe me? Would I?
When you completed your book, do you feel you reached a type of closure? Or that you reached a feeling you hadn’t quite felt before?
TN: I can’t pinpoint a specific moment when I thought, “This is done.” When I was submitting the manuscript for publication, I was constantly revising. Once Hub City accepted it, I worked on it for months with my brilliant editor, Leslie Sainz, going poem by poem. After that, there continued to be small changes and corrections throughout the proofing stage. The closest I’ve gotten to closure is probably when I received my box of books in the mail. Getting to hold the finished product of years and years of work was thrilling. Still, though, I like to think that these poems will continue to evolve, if not on the page, then in my relationship to them. I’m curious to see how that shifts over time and how it will inform the writing that is still to come.
ER: Although your collection is still in its infancy, what do you hope for it a few years from now? And how do you see it interacting with your future work?
TN: Cleave was officially released on April 6. I texted my best friend about how I was simultaneously so happy and so exhausted, and she said that it sounded a lot like childbirth. Though I’m not a parent, that seems pretty apt. This book is the result of many years of labor and love. It also feels like a child because now that I’ve ushered it into the world, it’s out of my hands. I have to let it go and hope it’s strong enough to stand on its own. Since finishing Cleave, I’ve been working on a lyric essay about my first trip back to Korea, the impact of migration on the body, and the history of mirrors. In many ways, this new piece is an extension of the ideas I began exploring in the book. I like to think of the poems in Cleave as roots to a tree that’s just starting to sprout.
ER: You're based out of New Orleans, which has a rich cultural, historical, and literary history. How has the city influenced your writing and what source of inspiration does it provide on a day to day basis?
TN: I’ve been in New Orleans for 12 years, and it’s such a complicated, beautiful, messy, eccentric city. I love living here. Since coming from New York, I spend a lot more time outside, and I’ve noticed how nature finds its way into my writing. The bayou, swamp, my backyard garden, and compost heap have all slid into poems. Also, glitter and rain. In New Orleans, sometimes it feels like there’s so much out to get us—coastal erosion, street flooding, boil water advisories, ubiquitous potholes—and yet there’s such an insistence on survival, community, and joy. We also have Mardi Gras and second lines and crawfish boils and a long history of organizing and activism. Often, New Orleans reminds me to slow down, re-prioritize, and re-focus, in both my writing and daily life.
ER: It’s fascinating how living in a place finds its way into one’s work, in much the same way that the work of writers we admire finds its way into our own writing. What authors have found their way into work?
TN: Cleave wouldn’t have been possible without the help of my teachers and so many friends, all writers themselves, who provided indispensable feedback and whose own poems were always a source of inspiration. For example, A. Van Jordan’s MACNOLIA taught me how to integrate history in my poems, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s Rocket Fantastic taught me how to be vulnerable. While I learned how to write about the body, silence, and grief from Split by Cathy Linh Che and Bone Confetti by Muriel Leung, Paul Otremba and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello taught me the careful art of ordering a manuscript. Being a writer can be an incredibly solitary endeavor, and I’m so grateful to have a community of writers that I can turn to for insight and care.
ER: 2020 was undoubtedly a year like no other, and in the midst of so much uncertainty, the writing community has pulled together to bring light to injustices and to amplify underrepresented stories and voices. What is your hope for poetry’s (and literature’s) place in society in the present moment and in the future?
TN: Representation matters. As a young person, I had no adoptees—writers or otherwise—to look up to who spoke to my experience. I hope that more poets and writers from historically marginalized backgrounds have the opportunity to get their voices heard and their work read. I hope literature and the literary world can serve as a space for community building and solidarity rather than exclusivity and gatekeeping. I hope poets will continue to challenge silence and systems of oppression as we work to construct new paradigms. There’s so much amazing poetry being written right now that’s knocking people’s socks off, and I can’t wait to see the waves that will come as a result.
