An Interview with Josephine Chun, Author of "Bloom"

TD: The cover image for your chapbook is a raspberry and it’s printed in blue ink. Is this meant to be a blue raspberry like in the poem or just a coincidence?

JC: [Just a coincidence.] I originally wanted it to be black because I was going for one of those old-school apothecary charts that you see in pharmacies. My grandma has a bunch of those in her house and they’re all in black and white. Black apparently wasn’t an option but I like the way the blue turned out. It was either blue or silver but I didn’t think the silver was going to show up well on the cream paper that I picked. I would have considered red because raspberries are red but a deep green would have been fun too.

TD: If you could have designed the cover so that it looked however you wanted it to, how would you have designed it?

JC: I probably would have done it in all black. I didn’t want it to be super flashy because there’s a lot of detail in it already. I didn’t want it to be overwhelming.

TD: How and why did you decide on the name “Bloom” for the collection?

JC: I was title-less for a while. I can’t remember what other people in the class suggested for me, I think someone suggested “Blue Redefined” but I didn’t feel like blue was present enough in the rest of my poems besides “Sleeping Man and Sitting Woman” and “Blue Razz,” so I scratched that one. And then I was reading through my poems again and there are a bunch of blooms and flowers in my poems— raspberries, blue razz, the dead flowers in "The Lie," the plum tree in “The Tea Ceremony,” the plum-like bruise in “The End of the World.” And along with bloom, flowers represent innocence to me in a way and a lot of my poems are about my childhood. They also represent change because they're so seasonal. I So yeah, I kind of stuck to it.

TD: Why did you decide to start the collection with “I Wanted”?

JC: I feel like it would be a really bold statement to have my chapbook begin with a statement of what I want. But then throughout the collection my idea of what I want changes. [In “I Wanted”] These are all sort of physical, tangible items for the most part whereas a lot of my poems later focus on relationships and my family.

I put “Underwear Girl” second on purpose because I’m really young in that poem and it felt like a natural beginning to start very specifically in my home with my grandmother. This poem moves pretty quickly in time. There’s a very sudden jump to where I’m going through puberty, getting my period, so I thought that was a nice way to kick things off. So I wanted to put that in the beginning because of how young I was.

TD: Who were your biggest influences when it came to producing this collection?

JC: In terms of subject matter, definitely my parents. I’m really close to my parents so a lot of my poems are about them and my relationship with them and how I've observed them growing up. The first poetry class I ever took was in high school with my teacher Emily Moore. She’s a poet herself and writes a lot in form. She challenged me when I was in high school to write in form and focus on meter and rhyme. Greg Williamson and Mary Jo Salter also do a lot with form. I'm so excited by the way form and meter can help you write what you want to say and also restrict you from saying what you want to say to find something even better. Form has definitely been a motivator for me.

TD: So many of the poems in Bloom are ekphrastic. Can you talk a bit about how you see the interaction between art and poetry?

JC: Before I declared Writing Seminars as my major (I was undeclared for almost a year and a half—I had no idea what I was doing), I actually thought I was going to be an Art History major. That’s where my love of art comes from. I love art because I can’t do art myself—I can’t paint— but I think paintings are so beautiful, interesting, and historical. And I’ve had a lot of assignments where I’ve needed to write ekphrastic poems—“Sleeping Man and Sitting Woman” was for an ekphrastic assignment, same with “The Lie.” So I think I got lucky in that respect where I was forced to do it, enjoyed it, and did it again. It’s something I want to continue doing.

TD: Before this class, had you ever heard of or read a chapbook?

JC: Before this class, I just thought of a chapbook as a small collection of poetry, which it is, but I think being in this class has made me appreciate it for other things—thinking about a chapbook in terms of its design, order. Just because it’s a small collection of poems doesn’t mean it can’t have an arc or theme.

TD: What is your favorite poem in the collection?

JC: Some of them mean a lot to me. “The Lie” is the first poem that I ever had published so it was really validating to me. It was like “Oh my goodness! Someone recognizes my poetry!” Of the poems I wrote this semester, I really like the way “Asterisk” turned out. The form and style are very out of my comfort zone. It was just a really fun poem to write.

TD: One of my favorite poems in your collection is “The Tea Ceremony.” Can you tell me about the inspiration for that poem? Did the form come first or the subject matter?

JC: Most of my poems, whether they’re in form or not, I start as sonnets because I love the form and I’m really familiar with it. If I haven’t written a poem in a while, I’ll try writing a sonnet to get into the groove of writing again. I wrote “The Tea Ceremony” for a class last semester, and the assignment was to either write a sonnet or a sestina. I thought “The Tea Ceremony” was going to be a sonnet, but it started to burst out of its seams and even though I love rhyme, the rhymes weren’t working. Instead, I liked certain words like plum, and I loved what you could do with veil because it’s both a noun and a verb. There were so many words in there that were dexterous so I was like, “Why don’t I try and do a sestina instead?” It was inspired by my cousin’s wedding. We’re Korean-American and she wanted to have a traditional Korean wedding ceremony before she did the typical white-dress, western style wedding. It was a whole day affair and was really special.

TD: You described “Ski Poem” as a compilation of multiple different poems. Why did you decide to separate “Ski Poem” into those two parts?

JC: “Ski Poem” started as a sonnet. It wasn’t working so I was like “What form or shape could I put it in?” I had a feeling it was going to go longer than 14 lines. I was looking through my chapbook for other forms that I’d used before that I liked. “The End of the World” is definitely one of my more free verse poems but it’s still formal in that the first part is eight couplets, the next part has four, and then two couplets, and ends with one couplet. So I thought maybe I should try out the couplets, but it didn’t work in the 8-4-2-1 form as well as “The End of the World” where the decreasing number of couplets emphasizes the way my dad’s hypochondria started to snowball—I didn’t really get that feeling from "Ski Poem." But I kind of liked the idea of two parts.

I wanted the first part to be really sensory-focused on the skiing and on what it was like to ski as a child. The second part is more of a reflection on what skiing means to me and means to my family.

TD: How did you go about ordering the poems in Bloom?

JC: There are 15 poems and I knew that I wanted to put the three ekphrastic sonnets in the middle. I didn’t really know what to do with them so I took Dora’s suggestion not to put them in the middle. So I had those three and then I was like, “Oh! That means I have six and six on either side.” So I sort of picked the poems where I’m mostly a child to go in the beginning and then the poems where I’m a little older or about more mature subjects—like I have “The Tea Ceremony” that’s about a wedding towards the end, and “Blue Razz” is a little later because I wanted that to follow “Raspberry (n.)” in the first part. I also wanted to separate the poems written in similar forms so I put “Strum” and “I Wanted” on opposite ends.

TD: The vast majority of your poems are written in form. What is it about formalist poetry that draws you to it?

JC: I feel like I can’t write poems if I don’t write in form, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I will say: I’m trying to push myself to not rely on forms as much, especially since I’m moving towards graduating and won't be writing poems for an assignment. I definitely want to experiment more with writing outside form, but I love form.

TD: What would you say is the thread that runs through all the poems in the collection?

JC: I will say my chapbook relates together because a lot of them are formal poems. I definitely think there are some themes—I have a lot of poems about my parents and change. This question's hard to answer because I don’t really think I’ve figured it out for myself yet. I’m not a very prolific poet, so this chapbook is basically all the poems I have!

TD: How would you describe Bloom?

JC: Bloom is definitely a collection of my obsessions. My obsession with form, my strange obsession with my allergies (I have so many weird allergies—raspberries are the only one that made it in, but I’m allergic to so many other things), my strange obsession with my parents because I am so close to them—I pick up on the weird things that they do. My dad is sort of a doomsday preparer, which is so weird I knew I needed to write a poem about it. And my mom has this thing where she hates rewearing outfits. I’m inspired by them all the time.

TD: Which poem was the easiest for you to write? The hardest?

JC: I wrote “I Wanted” the fastest. I think it has to do with the ballad form I choose. Each stanza is four lines, the first two and the last line have three stresses and the third line has four. It has a very set metrical scheme so the form definitely took over the writing process; I didn’t feel like I was writing the poem. I felt like the form was dictating to me what needed to be said. Because of that, I thought that “Strum,” which is also in the same form, would go just as quickly, but that one was the slowest poem in the whole collection. I was running out of things that you could actually strum! And I wanted [those two poems] to be exact mirrors of each other because they’re placed on opposite ends of the book, but I was definitely grabbing at straws trying to finish “Strum.”

TD: Can you tell me about any mishaps you had while creating your physical chapbook?

JC: I’m going to be really honest and tell you that these are not pictures of raspberries [on the cover]. They’re blackberries! I couldn’t find a photo of raspberries that was high enough resolution but also high contrast enough to work for the letterpress. I figured blackberries looked similar enough so that was okay. I did have a moment of panic and a moment of identity crisis where I was like, “They’re not real raspberries!” But then I was like maybe that makes it kind of funny and more whimsical in a way. Now everyone knows my secret!

Other mishaps… I had a hard time figuring out how the layout would go, just because I have some poems that go onto two pages. I was worried about type font. I was worried about sewing. Professor Malech definitely sewed most of my chapbooks. I was so slow and she offered to help. Thank you Professor Malech! It would have taken me forever.

TD: This is more on the technical side but I love your layout. What kind of font and spacing did you use?

JC: I love Times New Roman. It’s the only font I really love. If something’s not in Times New Roman I get a little annoyed sometimes. It’s Times New Roman but I played around with how far apart the words are. What I thought was really cool on InDesign was that you could compress and widen your text so I widened everything. I think the text is 80 and the title is 100.

TD: What’s next for Josephine Chun?

JC: I have a lot of student loans so I’m definitely working in corporate America these next few years to pay that debt back and save up for grad school. I thought about getting an MFA, but I don’t think I want to. If anything, it’s always been a pipe dream of mine to become a librarian. The only reason why I write—because I don’t feel like I love writing the way that a lot of other people do—is because I love to read, and I learned to love reading at my library. I still spend hours at my local public library. We used to have five public libraries close to my house, but now there's only one because they've had to shut branches down. It’s been really heartbreaking to see libraries becoming less and less relevant and that people aren’t taking advantage of them because everything is so digital now. I'm very passionate about having a public space that promotes literacy, community outreach, and connection, so I definitely want to be a librarian one day! Hopefully I'll go to grad school for that.

Honestly, I don’t see myself publishing any of my own poetry or fiction. I’m really grateful that studying Writing Seminars at Hopkins these four years has given me the space and the time to really write for me. I don’t really have the desire to publish anything.

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Josephine Chun received her Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Born and raised in New York City, she currently resides in Queens, NY. She is an incoming analyst at Kobre & Kim, LLP and a proud supporter of her local public library.

Teja Dupree will graduate from Johns Hopkins University with a Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars in 2019. She is the author of La Femme (2018).