When I first became aware of Stephanie Duhem’s poems sometime in 2020 or 2021, they were the work of an anonymous and mysterious Twitter presence, someone who published in journals I had never heard of and wrote obliquely on occult themes. I instantly perceived an intricacy and playfulness (a “ludic” quality, as Blake Smith has put it) that gave them authority of a distinctly poetic kind—the kind that comes from tuning oneself to a different wavelength than that of ordinary speech, one beyond the power of the ordinary self.
The fate of the online poem is the 404 message, the dead URL. As memorable as my first encounters with Duhem’s poems were—I can still see in my mind’s eye the elegant web design of the now-defunct journal where I first read “Whatever Is Unsaid,” with its limpid opening image of a heron, “swill[ing] the air like wine”—I was happy to learn that her poems would be collected in a book, thus giving her practice enduring form.
To embark upon this volume is to be impressed, first of all, by its scale. Unlike many first collections, Cataclysm Moves Me I Regret to Say bears the heft of an ongoing artistic practice, with its implied duration and freedom: poem after poem seems dictated by no impulse other than the poet’s own interests. Recurring themes of doubling, masks, moments of affective intensity and elevation, whether through love or the disciplining of the body, for good or ill (see: “eating disorder not otherwise specified”) feel emergent rather than prescribed. The same is true of the book’s formal experiments. There is the odd villanelle or poem in quatrains, but for the most part, the book avoids set structures in favor of nonce forms, in which traditional elements play a more vestigial—which is also to say a more deeply internalized—role. One constant, however, is logopoeia, the third of Ezra Pound’s trio of poetic elements alongside phanopoeia (visual imagery) and melopoeia (sonic texture), and defined by him as “the dance of the intellect among words.”
Every reader will have their own favorites among Duhem’s poems. My own sense of where the core of her artistry lies—of where she is most fully herself as a poet—inclines, paradoxically, toward those poems where she is least herself: the persona and quasi-persona poems, such as “Eve Thinks,” “Esau,” “Prometheus Bound” (an ekphrastic poem—another of her interests), “Arachne in Haiku,” “Bathsheba to David,” and “Ariadne in Triptych.” Although, to these poems where the mythic voice predominates, I would add several that do the opposite, constructing not an otherworld of myth, but a specific sense of place: whether in the already mentioned “Whatever Is Unsaid” (set in rural New Hampshire) or, in a blend of both modes, “To Autumn C,” presumably addressed to the novelist Autumn Christian and channeling something of Elizabeth Bishop’s invocation to Marianne Moore to “come flying.” With rare wit and charm, Duhem creates with that poem a portrait of a figure and a friendship that inhabit the everyday but are also larger-than-life.
No matter the theme she touches on, her poems have both an earthliness and an elevation, an antiquity—something that, while still feeling contemporary, feels as if it has blown in from some other time.
The following conversation ranges widely across Duhem’s experience as a 1.5 generation Chinese-American writer, her crafting of new personae in different linguistic and cultural milieux, both online and not, and her ambivalent interest in forms of transcendence seemingly promised by various internet subcultures.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Paul Franz: As I was reading through the book, I came to the poem “Bathsheba, to David,” and I thought, “This for me is a Steff poem.” You know, just the texture of it:
You drew me down this
path, how I have drawn the dark
waters about my bath, like
a candle in the black
jar full of tar—which is
night turned wound,
when you ashed the fire of
my star: my love for whom
I washed.
It just jumps off the page. How do you think about sound and rhyme and internal rhyme as structuring principles?
Stephanie Yue Duhem: It’s pretty intuitive for me. I don’t know that I have a philosophy of rhyme or anything like that, but I will say that I came to poetry pretty late. Throughout most of my twenties, I was just a corporate girlie in New York, clubbing four to five nights a week. I wasn’t at all a serious writer or even reader. But when I went through a divorce, I feel like it changed me neurologically. I started voraciously reading poetry and then began to write it. I’m a perfectionist, and I didn’t have any sort of metric to judge what I was doing, so I bought a bunch of poetry craft books. The first one I worked through was called Writing Metrical Poetry. I’m a little old school in this way, but I think you have to know the rules to break them. So the fact that the first time I studied poetry, aside from high school, was this metrical poetry book—that instilled in me a level of appreciation for rhyme and meter beyond what’s maybe typical of the current moment. I will say, though, that rhyming too much is something I’ve been faulted for. A recurring comment I would get in my MFA program was that my poems had too much wordplay: rhymes, internal rhymes, consonance, assonance, or double entendres.
PF: This is the stuff I really like, though—like in the poem “Drift”: “the specter of a scepter,” or “a tree silvering in rain, / slivering at the thunderbolt.” You shift one element and it becomes a different word, like it’s revealing a new meaning that generates the next moves of the poem. Rhyme seems related to the theme of doubling in the book, as in the poem title “Nom et Nom,” which translates into French—i.e., doubles—the title of your earlier chapbook, Name and Noun, but ironically loses the distinction of meaning, since French uses the same word for both (another doubling). This calls to mind language learning, a theme in the poem “Origins.” Can you say more about that?
SYD: I’ve always been intrigued by doppelgängers and masks. I think it’s related to my background as a first-generation immigrant and having to learn a new language in a self-conscious way, at the same time that I had to develop a new persona because of the cultural differences between the United States and China. I had just turned six when my family came to the US, so I went through school here, but those first years were rough. I feel like I’ve doubled many times in my life, with immigration being just the first instance. There was the time I spent in France with my first husband, who’s French. That was another language and culture I had to learn to navigate (though he later moved with me to New York City). It’s just all these dislocations on top of each other, each time requiring another doubling or another sort of mask.
PF: The notion of performance crops up in your poem “Dental Work,” which points out the social signaling in what kind of carrots a person buys. The narrator speaks of “An entire color wheel of carrots inspired by the accoutrements of Victorian residences. / Sure those are spendier but maybe they support ecological / diversity better. Maybe they say to others who see it in my / basket I eat ugly produce. The uglier the better the more / virtuous the more correct….” This and other poems suggest that extroversion isn’t the same thing as sincerity, and can contain an element of disguise. What should readers make of this blend of performance and privacy?
SYD: Confessionalism is the best defense of the interior. I’m also a micro-diarist on Twitter. That’s kind of a pretentious way of putting it, but I try to document my life in small ways. It constitutes a form of confessionalism, which I think can be a very effective smokescreen for the parts of yourself that you want to protect. No one pries further once you’ve, you know, been messy online about your divorce.
PF: The book seems to be organized in a triptych. I was wondering if the structure was geographical—the middle section, in particular, felt like it had a more distinct sense of location, specifically Texas, though there were also some New York poems in the first section. Is that a fair description?
SYD: I restructured it many times. It used to be that when a poet came out with their collection, it was just named something like, Poems 1973 to 1977. There wasn’t anything wrong with just a collection of what you wrote over, say, a five-year period. In the contemporary poetry market, there is a real push to create a narrative. So I was trying to do that. And that meant that sometimes I’d have poems about, you know, three different relationships, but I might smush them into a sequence just to create a narrative arc. It’s an artificial scaffold, but I would say the first third of the book is about my background, my family, my heritage, and young adulthood—my first forays into the world outside the domicile and family life. The second is focused more on dating, adult life, and Texas. And then the third section is mostly love poems or divorce poems.
PF: It’s interesting how forcing things into an arc forces them into the archetypal. To me, this book has the good qualities of the “traditional” Poems 1950–71, or whatever. It’s such a substantial collection. It feels weighty, like there’s a significant body of work here, a real artistic practice. The word that comes to mind for me is “authenticity”—not in the sense we typically use it, as in grounded in an identity or experience, but “authentic” in its fidelity to poetry itself. Can you say a word about your relationship to the sources and inspirations of your poems, and how these relate to your practice?
SYD: A lot of my poems feel to me channeled from an outside source. I feel like I’m just the vessel bringing these poems into the world. Because these poems don’t come from me, I don’t in my heart of hearts believe they’re “mine.” I’m always ready to never write a poem again. I put this book together as if it was the only book I’d ever put out. I wrote poetry in high school and really enjoyed it, but then I didn’t write poetry again for ten years. I wasn’t visited by that spirit for an entire decade. And I’m prepared for that to happen again. I’m at peace with that.
PF: In this book we have Bathsheba, we have Eve, we have Arachne, we have Ariadne, and we have Esau, who is addressed rather than the speaker of the poem. What do these personas do for you? How do they fit into the book?
SYD: I was really into Greek myths and fantasy as a kid. As an immigrant, I wanted to be familiar with the Western canon. My family was not well off. We had almost no books in the house during my early childhood. In my teens, feeling an autodidactic responsibility, I made my parents buy me books. In one of my poems, “Origin,” I talk about how, again in my teens, I asked my dad to paint Ionic columns on my bedroom walls. It seems cringe to me now, given the politicized aesthetic turn towards Classicism or Neoclassicism online. But that wasn’t a metaphor in the poem: I literally asked my dad to paint Ionic columns on my bedroom walls. And I loved it.
Maybe this speaks to being a natural contrarian, but I especially identified with mythological women’s expressions of rage, desire, jealousy, greed—all these extremely negative feelings. Those archetypal stories were such a helpful avenue for me, and some of my poems reflect that foundation.
PF: Tell me about growing up the child of a painter. It’s not the typical case of “no books in the house.”
SYD: From a young age, I was very much inclined towards the arts. But my parents had kind of a gender-flipped relationship. They were part of the first class after the Cultural Revolution to enroll in college. The government brought folks back in from the countryside and the factories and had everyone do aptitude testing, then assigned them majors. My mom got assigned to study computer science, even though she had never used a computer before. My dad was good at drawing and painting, so he went to art school. Going straight from middle school to art school, my dad didn’t have a strong education. He didn’t read for pleasure.
Since my dad was a painter and my mom was a programmer, she became the breadwinner in the United States. For a while, he had one of those carts in the malls where he’d sell portraits of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and if people wanted their own portrait, they could commission one. He really discouraged me from the arts. Both my parents did, because it was obvious how difficult it was for him.
PF: When I first became aware of your work, I knew nothing about you. I don’t think I knew your name. You were this anonymous Twitter person. I’m curious how you developed your Twitter persona and what you were drawn to on that platform.
SYD: I came to Twitter pretty late—during COVID. A lot of people said that the halcyon days of Twitter had already passed. I think that, like many people, I was tired of the mainstream discourse. But it was also a diary. I’ve had a diaristic practice ever since I was a teenager—I used websites that people don’t even know anymore, like Xanga and Diaryland. There was also my Paris expat blog on Blogspot. As COVID hit, I felt like I needed an outlet again, because the more that nothing happens, the more I feel compelled to narrativize my life. And there was a playfulness with a lot of accounts around that time. I think Twitter took a very dark turn recently. Now I do think that the best or most fun days are over.
PF: You had a period of interest in the philosophy of accelerationism, which you speak of now with embarrassment. Evidently you didn’t find what you were looking for in it. What were you hoping for from this dissident scene?
SYD: This was coterminous with COVID. I was very indoors and then very online and then thinking, okay, what is the logical endpoint of being very online. This was about the same time that I became aware of the ideas of Nick Land or, on the other end of the spectrum, Donna Haraway. I was reading different flavors of accelerationists, including Laboria Cuboniks and Xenofeminism. I was fascinated by this idea—especially as we were all sitting in front of the computer for, you know, fourteen hours or sixteen hours a day—that we could question the point of having a body or an identity or a race or a gender. I became intrigued by brain-in-a-vat–type theories, just sort of thinking “how convenient” to be physically unencumbered. I think I was depressed, to be honest with you, but I had this drive towards self-annihilation, which is something I’ve had throughout my life. Throughout my twenties, I struggled with eating disorders, like in that poem “eating disorder, not otherwise specified.” It was just a desire to vanish. When you’re so self-conscious, you want to erase the self. In any way possible.
PF: Your poetry has these grand, sublime images—like in “Camera Obscura,” one of the love poems at the end of the book, there’s this mixture of gentleness, as in the relatively placid images of the angel who is “already aloft / over a lake. // He is already / a smile-hued dream,” but then also the violent intensity of the “sword,” the “new incision in / the world,” the “scissoring wings,” and then, of course, the “Camera obscura” itself, a device by which “light punches a hole / and beams.” But we also have compelling images in a lower key; what I love about a poem like “Drift” is that it’s about found objects, including rhymes and words that contain another word, if you just shift a letter. There seems to be an interest in synchronicity: in these seemingly trivial, chance occurrences that end up suggesting something beyond the self. Would you say that’s true of your practice?
SYD: Well, what Jung says about synchronicity is that it happens at this layer before the physical and the spiritual have separated. They’re not structurally distinct yet. And that’s maybe also what causes synchronicity in terms of rhyme.
PF: Tell me about the color orange. There’s so much orange and oranges and carrots and it seems like kind of a talismanic color in the book.
SYD: I’ve always been obsessed with orange. Orange and purple—surreal interior landscape colors. To me, they’re the colors of dreams. Besides being a diarist, I keep a dream journal, and have since my teens. Some of these poems were transcribed from lines I dreamt—I woke up with fully formed lines and wrote them down. Other poems just take their imagery from dreams, like the parking garage lion in “A Lion.”
One poem that was a hundred percent transcribed from a dream text was “eating disorder not otherwise specified.” I also transcribed about a third of “Drift” from a dream text.
PF: What is the dream world for you? Is it something metaphysical? Or is it something that gives you access to a stratum of your own mind?
SYD: Like I said, I think that I’m just a vessel for an outside force at times. Not most of the time, but when a dream is channeled like that, I tend to think of it as not mine. Obviously, as you’re reading this book, there are a lot of references to my life. But I see those as incidental. It’s as though the force behind the dream which then becomes a poem is not me, and if certain details seem autobiographical, that’s just incidental.
PF: How do you square that with your earlier claim that your interest in masks and so forth stems from being a 1.5 generation Chinese-American poet and various kinds of personal and familial experiences that you portrayed as so formative and decisive. I’m getting a different picture now.
SYD: Let me distinguish. There are a couple classes of poems in here. The ones that are channeled: I don’t really see those as having to do with me. There are other poems that are more me, that I labored and sweated over. I guess the more labor that went into it, the more I see it as my poem. Now we’re going into a whole labor theory of value. But if I channeled it, it’s not really mine. If I worked on it, then it’s mine. And the ones that are mine are more informed by autobiographical details—and, in general, by the themes that I like: masks, doppelgängers, personas, archetypes.
PF: So the doppelgängers, masks, archetypes don’t occur in the dictated poems, the ones that come to you from outside?
SYD: They probably do. I think they do.
PF: The spirits are finding an appropriate vessel.
SYD: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Exactly.
PF: Would you have published the book if it only contained the poems that you felt that you had produced by the sweat of your brow?
SYD: No. Because those aren’t as good as the ones that I channeled.