A conversation with poet Ashley Sojin Kim on her chapbook, "Have You Eaten?"

Renee Scavone: Throughout your chapbook there are strong themes of family and tradition, and what it means to rebel against and embrace both. In particular, there are many works about your “type A mother”, and at our reading you mentioned that you got her permission to read Umma aloud. Did you start out initially with the want to tell her story? How do you think that this thread influences/plays off of other poems in the collection?

Ashely Kim: Honestly, that poem was probably the one I spent the least time on when I was writing it because it just came so easily. Usually, I am a pretty slow writer and never finish in one sitting, but “Umma” was a one-and-done. I made some revisions here and there, but it didn’t stray too far from the original. I have six people in my immediate family, including myself. My mother has definitely had the most impact and influence on my life, so it wasn’t so much a conscious choice as it was a natural inclination to write about her. Being able to understand her has helped me understand myself, in a lot of ways, and this helps inform the poems in my chapbook.

I sent “Umma” to her after I wrote it because, even though I write a lot, I don’t often share my work with people outside of class, and I wanted her to be able to get a sense of what I write and how I write. She absolutely loved it, but asked me not to include it in my chapbook because she didn’t want my grandma, aunt, and uncle to read it (as they also appear in the poem) and possibly be hurt by some of the implications. One of my previous professors had said that writers often can’t write about the people they’re closest to, and this was my first experience having this conflict. Out of respect and care for her, I suggested making an abridged version of the chapbook for my relatives, and asked her if I could read this aloud at the reading—both of which she was okay with.

RS: Branching off of that: in the midst of all these deeply personal, familial works, poems like Fog and London Morning are noticeably different from the pieces surrounding them. What was the thought process behind including them, and their placement within the collection? On a similar note, the last three poems of the collection also depart from this—why include them all together, at the end?

AK: Those two poems are a bit more existential-leaning, as in they are pretty self-reflective without being explicit in that purpose. After those sections of personal experiences or grappling with difficult news, I needed the reader to take a breath with me and process what was going on. By the end of the chapbook, I wanted to come away with ideas that were a bit more abstract, to not give a definitive, conclusive, ending based on what I wanted to say. I think I wanted more possibility for looser interpretation instead of having specific experiences and the associations that follow them. Also, I’m allowing myself that freedom as well, as I’m young and am still trying to understand myself and the world around me better.

RS: Your poems often utilize uneven lines (like in Seaweed and Giving Flowers) as well as uneven stanza length (The Perfect Fit) or, sometimes, both (How to Boil an Egg). Similarly, you contrast your usually longer poems with short sections in Umma and Expectations. How would you describe the relationship between form and content in your work, both initially and in revision?

AK: Before this semester, almost everything I wrote was in form. Having that kind of structure was helpful to me in having something to guide me in my writing. I have to admit—some of the weirder forms were from my poetic forms class, “Giving Flowers” being one of them. I think I wrote one or two poems in blank verse this semester and also a few that were syllabic, but I took this semester as an opportunity to really just try things out based a little more on visual appearance.

“Umma” was one of those where I focused a lot on how it looked on the page. I feel that this was especially effective in the third section, with “roundabout ways.” “The Perfect Fit” I knew had to be very rhythmic, as the content of that poem was about organization and fitting into a mold. The shorter sectioning of longer poems helped me in their organization. The longer poems took on larger, more encompassing themes, and having sections helped me to just pick out the parts I thought mattered most without having to necessarily connect everything seamlessly—letting the association be enough to tie them together.

RS: There are poems written in iambs throughout the book, though they notably pick up in the section where The Perfect Fit, Sexual Abuse at Choate, and London Morning are all in a row. What role did rhythm play in creating these, and placing them (and others) in the greater context of your chapbook?

AK: Accentual-syllabic meter is probably the most comfortable for me, kind of as mentioned in my response to the previous question. “The Perfect Fit” was rhythmic because of the rigidity of expectation. The choice to use iambic pentameter for “Sexual Abuse at Choate” was twofold. I wanted it to mimic a newspaper article, like the one that it was named after, but in a poetic sense. I figured that iambic pentameter was a poetic standard in that way. I also wanted the calm presentation of something that was pretty traumatic for a lot of people, and the formal nature of the email they sent us (as alumni) was my attempt to kind of imitate that sense of dissociation. Then, I wanted to contrast the depiction of “London Morning” as very hectic with a contained form.

My decision to place these poems and other poems was mostly thematic rather than formal. However, I did want the first poem in the collection to be less formal, and I wanted the last poem to be fairly regular.

Kim, reflecting on her work: "By the end of the chapbook, I wanted to come away with ideas that were a bit more abstract, to not give a definitive, conclusive, ending based on what I wanted to say."

RS: From London to a northeast boarding school to a beach in LA, place factors into many of your poems. This seems to combine most potently with the aforementioned themes of family and tradition in Family Visit. Likewise, a focus on food also seems to enrich the relationship between these two topics from the very start with poems like How to Boil an Egg. Alternatively, in the final poem Palos Verdes we find a narrator alone on the edge, breathing in “salt-mist air” that “sustains me wholly”. What do you feel your chapbook on whole has to say about life within and without the familial unit/tradition?

AK: Going to boarding school for high school forced me to live away from my family starting from when I was fourteen, so a feeling of displacement from both the place that I identified as home and from my family was something that I thought about a lot. Also, being the daughter of immigrants, I saw my parents’ separation from the country they grew up in and from many of their family members. Food is an easy way to immediately invoke a sense of comfort and familiarity, which is maybe why I gravitated towards that so much. (On a side note, the closest Korean food I had access to in my Connecticut boarding school was a twenty-minute drive away, and that was before ride services like Uber and Lyft existed. Imagine not being able to eat your favorite food or cuisine for months at a time! It was sad.)

Family and tradition are things we grow up with and things that shape our life experiences and identity. Most people, at some point, depart from both, and my chapbook deals with an exploration of someone who has come to see some of her experiences more objectively through this separation and through growing up. It’s a journey to make more sense of myself and the world around me through understanding my upbringing (and the conflicts between various aspects of my identity) and relationships with those around me.

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Ashley Kim is the author of the chapbook titled Have You Eaten? She received her Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars from the Johns Hopkins University. She was born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area and currently resides in Baltimore. She will pursue her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Renee Scavone attended Johns Hopkins University and received her Bachelor of Arts in Film & Media Studies and Writing Seminars in 2018.