In Jess Yuan’s Slow Render, across the landscapes of the speaker’s built and natural environments, she grapples with memory, architecture, and the ways that we render ourselves in narrative. In these lyrical meditations on place, Yuan thinks through how we make legible our histories and pasts. With a clarity that is incisive, Yuan examines how we understand our selves in relation to geography, family, and nation. In this interview, we discuss architecture, place, and transparency in relation to memory.
Vika Mujumdar (VM): I’m curious about how you came to poetry from being an architect. Was it something that you came to through architecture?
Jess Yuan (JY): I’ve been interested in poetry since I was very young. But I kept poetry to myself for a long time, and didn’t feel like it was something I could show publicly, or take on the life of being a poet. I was also interested in design as an intersection of being able to be creative and have a profession. Going into college, I was set on that. And there are a lot of overlaps, especially the language of critique; the way that design education revolves around these critiques in which your ability to describe and draw insights out of observation is really valued. But yes, I’ve always written poetry alongside studying and then working as an architect. It was a strange kind of practice, to try to be able to cram all that into my twenties.
VM: Thinking about architecture, are there any poets or themes that you would consider this book in conversation with, thinking in particular about the larger architectural and literary landscapes?
JY: There are a few poems that were really tied to the thinking of my architectural thesis. When I was doing my master’s during the pandemic, in 2020, I was working on a greenhouse merged with a hospital, where I was really looking at a lot of the history of sanatoriums and this tradition that nature would heal you and cleanse your lungs from within. I was reading a lot about that moment of medical history, and that came through in some poems. There’s one, “Swiss Alps, the Sanatorium, Year 300,” that thinks about sanatoriums in a more speculative sense—what that relationship with nature and the body might look like in the future when nature itself is also threatened. Another poem that came from that project was “On Transparency,” when I was thinking about the X-ray. There’s an amazing scholarly book, X-Ray Architecture, by the architect and scholar Beatriz Colomina, which talks about how the discovery of the X-ray as something that impacted architectural perception; the ability to think of transparency and projection as modes of spatial representation as well as ways of looking into the body.
Another poem came from my experience practicing as an architect in Boston, where I was working for about two years, mostly in multifamily housing. I learned a lot about what it’s like to build in Boston. That led to some things that were brought up in the poem “Bureau of Decline,” which, over its sections goes over scenes of the Big Dig in Boston, the difficulties of excavating in Boston blue clay, and the history of how Boston was made by reclaiming land from these tidal flats over the centuries. And so, I’m grateful for all the architects and civil engineers that taught me those things. It really showed me too that the interesting subjects in architecture don’t end with academia, but in practice. The world is so much weirder than we think it is, and how it’s built is fraught and ripe for poetic investigation.
VM: As I was reading Slow Render, I really appreciated the sense of materiality. There is abstraction, of course, but it’s so materially rendered. To stay with the idea of architecture and materiality, since the arrangement of a poetry collection feels so architectural, how did you build, or design it? What were you considering in terms of arrangement, and as you split it into the three sections?
JY: It was unclear to me for a while. And I think that with debut collections, there is a sense that I was just writing these one at a time, at various stages, in very different places. And for a time I wasn’t ready to grapple with this question of how that all goes together, especially when there are things that are more architectural, more academic, more personal. But I was thinking more in terms of the relationship to the title, and the idea of slowly rendering into more and more personal and more and more moments of memory. And so from the beginning, I was thinking through the render, thinking through the architectural ideas of how the world is made. And I went from that as a framework into the underlying emotional landscape that requires going deeper into time and memory. As more of a private person, I felt the instinct to tuck away the childhood poems at the end. And whether that’s a literary framework or a personal impulse, I’m not sure, but that journey hopefully felt like one of greater intimacy with the reader as the book progresses.
VM: It’s interesting to hear you talk about the building of that intimacy and the sense of childhood that comes through at the end. In the notes section, you note that some of these poems are influenced by and deeply in conversation with writing by architects, especially the poems “Inventing Isometric” and “Strange Things from the West.” What was the process of writing those two poems, and how were they influenced by those texts in particular?
JY: Those two poems were written in the moment right after listening to a really great lecture by K. Michael Hays, who spoke about the history of architectural representations, and how the three-dimensional invention of perspective and isometric were tied to technological advancements that changed the structure of knowledge and society. “Strange Things from the West” is also the title of the lecture that inspired it— when I was in college I heard Chin-Sung Chang lecture on the influence of western art and telescopes and other visual instruments into the late Joseon dynasty in Korea on developing the art style into capturing depth in conventional ways. I remember seeing this series of western dogs that weren’t familiar to the Korean artists and the attempt at realism being so cute and strange at the same time. It was one of the best parts of an art education, to be able to absorb lovely ideas from brilliant lecturers.
VM: There’s such a strong sense of place in this collection, even if places themselves don’t appear by name. I’m curious about what places influenced the poems in this collection, and how you would characterize your relationship to place and its influence on your work?
JY: I love writing about place, but I feel like I don’t necessarily have an anchor to a kind of home. And so, I write a lot about California, where I grew up. But some poems also take place on the East Coast, in landscapes that were important to me in college and as a young adult, and also abroad. I do wonder, how much insight can a single poem offer on a place versus needing to dwell on a place longer? One of the places I write about often is a bike trail from my childhood. I biked along a trail in California, and I would bike part of it to my middle school, and I would bike it in the opposite direction to my high school, and if you biked fifteen miles past the high school, you would be at the beach. If you biked two miles past my middle school, you would be in the mountains. I spent a lot of my adolescence biking out my feelings along this trail. It’s a very dry landscape where the river has been channelized, and it’s just a meager stream of water, with rigorous concrete structures all around, and it makes me think so much about how it felt like to be sixteen and seventeen.
VM: In one of the “Untitled Landscape” poems, you write “But in childhood the land was not transparent.” How do you see the transparency and opacity of experience, memory, and narrativization?
JY: The idea of transparency begins with an architectural idea of transparency, through the motif of glass and then the X-ray as a way of seeing through. The idea of rendering and rendering into memory was about why a memory might be important to us, or how a place’s meaning isn’t immediately transparent, it arrives slowly. The kind of architectural rendering I was doing at the time I was writing these poems was much slower than it is now. It would come further into being pixel by pixel, and it would be overnight. And the slowness of how the image comes into being felt like a search for clarity of vision—it takes time, a slow journey to realization instead of an instant transparency.
VM: I’m so interested by the poems in this collection that share a title—for example the two “Slow Render” poems and the three “Untitled Landscape” poems. How did you decide on the titles and order of those poems?
JY: A friend, Sam Niven, said that they’re always trying to write the same poem again. I felt like I was doing that. I wanted to write “Slow Render,” and I wasn’t happy with the first one and felt the need to write it again. Afterwards, I didn’t really feel that one was “correct”, and that the other one needed to be thrown away, so I kept both. It was similar with the “Untitled Landscape” poems. Perhaps sharing a title means they’re a series, but they can also be read together. I was also inspired by poets who have continued to work in a series their whole lives, like Major Jackson’s “Urban Renewal” series that spans multiple books. Sometimes you’ve said it once, but you’re going to say it again and again and again. Even as I’m working on my second book now, words, motifs, and quotes from Slow Render are emerging again. Those repetitions happen because we continue to obsess over the same things.
VM: There’s such an interesting sense of mythmaking—which is most direct in “American Tourist”—but also comes through in these funny ways elsewhere too. The way that national myth is in conversation with the memories of childhood with the speaker and Trader Joe in “Agriculture” stands out as well. How do you see mythmaking and its role in Slow Render?
JY: Those poems were two of the earliest poems I wrote, when I was around twenty-one. In college, I was coming into political consciousness, and I was reflecting on things that I had accepted about my childhood, tropes about my diasporic community, immigrants from mainland China, who mostly immigrated post-Tiananmen, who I hadn’t thought of from the outside. Thinking about my political awakening in college, I was interested in whether I could write of myself as an American. In “American Tourist,” I’m thinking about the road trips that my family has taken and how often, as we left our very-Asian Southern California neighborhood, these more bizarre tensions of racism would show up, but I never really understood them. And, as a young woman of color, navigating relationships and fetishization I had anxieties about whether I was too assimilated. Those were channeled through this humor; I think I still write funny poems, but back then, I was in a great spoken word group and in that community, I was thinking through those attitudes in my own life and learning to laugh back, in a way. And that idea of myth is at the heart of the lyric too and how nation making relies on myth as well. The earlier poems in the first section also look at representation and mapping as a kind of myth.
VM: I noticed that the cover artwork is also by you, and I’m curious about how that came to be. Was it something you painted before or after the collection? What is the relationship between painting and poetry for you?
JY: I was initially hesitant about using my own work, and so the press and I looked at a couple of ideas. I thought of a series of paintings I did a long time ago that have mostly interior spaces and think about light in interiors of rooms, and how that series might be a good fit for the cover. But those paintings were done in 2010, when I was in high school, for my Studio Art AP portfolio. I was in my room a lot, and painted corners of my room—the dresser, the mirror, the easel. Thinking again about how much hindsight on childhood inflects our understanding of it, looking back now, I’m like, “who was she?” It seems very far away. But that was the most consistent art practice I’ve had over my life. Even though I paint still for fun, it’s odd to think that my younger self had a clarity of vision that I maybe don’t work in anymore, and that unearthing of still being the same person all along.
VM: It’s interesting to hear you talk about your art and writing in conversation, as two sides of the same artistic and poetic sensibility. Who would you characterize as your influences as a poet, broadly, over time?
JY: My earliest poetry obsessions were very canonical. Walt Whitman got me through a lot of high school. In college, I was more exposed to Asian American poetry and other poetic traditions; I love Cathy Park Hong and Victoria Chang. Terrence Hayes and Anne Carson have also been influential. Being an MFA student now, I’m reading so much more, and in a more organized framework. It’s interesting how your journey of reading on your own in your twenties brings you to such different places, as opposed to this more structured time in an MFA. I’m still also being influenced by everyone I’m being exposed to.
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Jess Yuan is a poet, educator, and architect. She is author of the chapbook Threshold Amnesia (Yemassee 2020) and has been supported by Kundiman, Miami Writers Institute, and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Her poems appear in Best New Poets, Tupelo Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Born in California to Chinese immigrants, Jess is based in Boston and Baltimore with her spouse.
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Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in Comparative Literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in Creative Writing (Prose). Her work has appeared in the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, the Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.
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