Interview #151 — Panda Wong

by Darlene Silva Soberano

Panda Wong is a poet and editor who lives on unceded land, so-called Melbourne/Narrm. She is an associate editor at The Suburban Review and has been published in Runway Journal, Rabbit, Sick Leave, Liminal, and more. She is also a 2020 Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow.

CW: touches on themes of death, suicide and mental health struggles.

Panda speaks with Darlene Silva Soberano on grief, on surface, on writing, and at the end of the interview, they have recorded two poems they read to one another. Panda was photographed on Zoom by Ho Chi Minh-based Thy Tran, who then printed Panda’s face onto a cake.

I’m sorry to ask you this while you’re kneading bread. Can we start by talking about grief? What is grief to you in your work and what can it do?

It’s yoghurt flatbread, by the way, not sourdough. I can’t get my starter to wake up. Anyways, that is actually such a huge question, because it’s such a broad thing. In my work, it’s a very specific type. It’s directly related to my grief for my dad, but I think it’s an interesting question to ask now because there is also an ongoing worldwide grief. Obviously, we live in extremely grief-stricken times. This past year, we’ve seen so many images of death and violence and destruction—it’s always existed but visually, it’s exploded across our screens in this endless barrage without distraction. I think my work is about existing in a world that is already full of grief. Trying to grapple with my own personal grief can feel really petty and small compared to the scale of grief that’s out there. It can be so overwhelming and consuming at the same time, and it’s also such a multi-faceted experience. So much writing around grief is really sanctified or fetishised, but the work I relate to the most, or see myself in, is the work that finds grief funny or annoying or inconvenient, because a lot of the time it just enters your life at really inconvenient times. I feel like it is one of the Big Topics, like love and death, because it goes hand in hand with death. But all those topics are put on a pedestal and talked about in grand terms and are really sanctified in that way, but they’re also part of our everyday lives as well. I want to resist fetishising grief—because our lives are kind of small and annoying and funny, that’s how I try to write and articulate grief.

I definitely see all of that—I see all of this thinking in your poetry, which is amazing. I read your poems and I think, oh, you express it so clearly.

Yeah, I’ve just started reading—I would say about 70% of the things that I read are about grief—so I’m actually reading this book by Alison Benis White and it’s called Please Bury Me in this. It’s an epistolary poetry book; it’s a letter, and it starts as a letter to her dad, but it ends up becoming a letter to the world, as well as the reader. When you undergo grief and the state that it puts you in, it makes you more sensitive or aware or in touch with wider grief in general. That’s just something I was thinking about.

It’s like a lightning rod.

You just see the world really differently. It’s one of those things that’s going to happen to everyone but it’s intensely life changing.

Have you read Victoria Chang’s Obit?

I haven’t read it. Anita [Solak] has it. but it looks really good so far from what she’s sent me of it.

I haven’t read it at all, but the parts I’ve read, I’ve been completely bowled over. I really wanna get my hands on it as well.

I am excited to read it. Maybe we can make Anita do a reading of it for us.

Oh, perfect. I think that you write about grief so interestingly, and in a way that I have not seen often, and it makes you a really exciting poet.

I was thinking about this thing that my friend said to me, about the death of her mum’s dad. Apparently, her mum just started screaming in a supermarket one day, years after her dad died—and I was like, I really don’t want to be that person. That’s actually something I just really don’t want to have to deal with in my life. I think that story kind of encouraged me to express my grief in a way that is far more public than the average person.

Right, is that how you came to poetry? I’ve never asked you properly how you came to poetry.

Yeah, that’s literally it.

That is, in itself, a poem.

I think the first poem that I wrote was the eulogy that I read at the funeral. So dark.

Would you ever put it together for publication?

It’s maybe… not a good poem but it’s a good eulogy. It’s not me trying to experiment with language or—not that a poem has to have all those things—but you know the intent when you come to a poem is different. I literally wrote this eulogy and it was so fucked up!!! It was the day before the wake and I was just so tired because I had gone to get the flowers from that 24-hour florist on Lygon Street and organised the urn and had to make a fucking slideshow for the funeral. Anyway, I had to write this thing and I guess I was avoiding it because it felt too final in a way that everything else didn’t. Because, also, at the time—I don’t know if you know this—but I was moving country at the same time. I was living in London. But because of everything happening, I moved back to just to see my dad in his last moments. Oh! And I also had been dumped from a vague/pseudo thing I was having with someone.

I think the first poem that I wrote was the eulogy that I read at the funeral. So dark.

Oh no, oh my god.

It was such a hectic time. So many things were ending. I had to quit my job, and I had to move back to Australia, and I was just like so manic. I was just listening to my dad’s five favourite Bee Gees songs on repeat and writing this eulogy and just crying and writing it. The kind of crying where your snot just runs into your mouth, it was so disgusting. Anyways, my best work doesn’t happen when I’m emotional.

Me neither.

Stuff comes out but it’s not good.

No, it’s definitely not good. It’s so unfocused and there’s not a lot to make of the raw emotional writing. I think there’s a place for it as a practice, or just personal healing through free writing, but maybe not as a work to publish.

Yeah, it just feels bad. It doesn’t feel good to write it. So that’s how my first poem was birthed—through Beegees and snot and mania.

That is quite filmic.

That is my life.

I see that your work is so clearly influenced by film aesthetics. In your poem, ‘I don’t know how to write poems,’ you write, “these days if / I see someone looking / at me on ptv / I can’t tell if / it’s because they think I’m cute / or if it’s because they are going to say something racist / but I put on a wistful yet coquettish expression and gaze in an aesthetically pleasing way out of the window just in case…” Do you think that, in your work, the way things seem are almost as important as the way things are?

That’s such an interesting and generous thing to say because I think I have these little delusions or ideas about fate and the cinematic potential of life. When I was younger, I had a fixation on creating scripts in my mind for certain scenarios and staging them in my head. It was my way of processing the world. I think I care about seeing details, like, I have all these photographs on my phone of bits of language that I see in real life that I think are spooky—like car license plates that say “CHILLAX” or this series of aphorisms in the window of a London laundromat that say '‘THERE IS A RHYTHM AND A FLOW TO LIFE AND I AM PART OF IT”.

Like whether it’s a simulation or a larger force out there with a very specific sense of humour, there’s so much about life that feels fateful, you know?

To come back to your question, I also think the way things seem aren’t mutually exclusive from the way they are. Surface isn’t separate… it’s just another moving part. I think that surface appearances are deeply related to performativity, which is really interesting in its malleability. I think a lot about performance as daily ritual that shifts in different settings, and how things like social media demand and develop our penchant for performance. I also think about its origin, J.L. Austin talking about how a sentence can also be an action. With a lot of my work, it’s like “how do I perform this feeling and how have I performed it? How can I make someone feel the things I’m feeling?” A poem is a performance—but I am also interested in the seams of that performance, the tensions of the private becoming public.

Speaking of films, I love the voiceover you wrote for the short film, REPLICA, which was shortlisted for Berlin Commercial. What was it like to write for film with someone else reciting your words? And to meditate on the themes of replication, loneliness, togetherness?

Thank you! It was good to write in a different way, with different intent. I had to think a lot about what the filmmaker wanted, and it was freeing in the sense that I could write within those constraints. Replication, loneliness, and togetherness are all things I think about often anyways but working to someone else’s ideas and with moving image was new to me. I’ve actually started making films since, so I wonder if that was influenced by this experience.

I think I have these little delusions or ideas about fate and the cinematic potential of life.

Towards the end of REPLICA, you write, “The universe is in the business of reminding you that you are not alone.” There’s a kind of calling to pronoia in your work, which you do explicitly write about in your poem, ‘YOPO (You Only Pronoia Once)’. Would you say that your work is underpinned by this joy in being present in the world—despite grief, or maybe because of grief? I find that your poems are quite joyful and present.

It’s a weird thing. I think about that Mary Ruefle poem: “I hated childhood / I hate adulthood / and I love being alive.” I have a friend Tracy [Chen], who says to me all the time that “two truths can and usually do exist alongside each other,” and my two truths are: I love life and life is the fucking worst.

I learned about pronoia from a Kaveh Akbar interview. It really struck me because it put words to a feeling I have about the world. I think it’s because that’s a feeling that my dad had about the world, so I think that’s something I inherited. I think that when I write, I tap into that. When I read my notes or observations, I realise that there are so many little details that actually do make the world really special. I think there’s so much more to find out about the world, and then the more you discover, the more you’re like, “Oh, the world is so fucked up and interesting.” I think for a long time, I have tried to reconcile the fact that I really care about life and the world while also kind of hating it at the same time. But that’s something probably everyone feels to some extent. I think about how I’m the only person who has lived experience of my life and that connects me to the act of living.

But not everyone is a poet—

Lucky them.

Lucky them. I’ll bring it back to a craft question. Does your background/interest in fashion influence your poems at all?

At first thought: no. Because that feels like a different person, but actually when I really think about my work, I think about the fact that I try to—I think I approach poetry almost from a “non-word” point of view, in that, at times I incorporate a lot of different things into it, like images and hyperlinks and all these references. And a big part of fashion is referencing and collaging and reworking things together, and—

Like Pinterest boards and Instagram collections.

Almost! I use Pinterest but I don’t wanna tell people that I do. For me, because of my fashion background, and because I’m used to having to explain all your references and your ideas, present a body of research and make moodboards (which I still make, I’m a Pinterest nerd), my approach to poetry is really referential and visual. I personally think that if you wanna make work and you’re only interacting with work of that discipline… like if you wanna make movies, I feel like you can’t really make movies if you’re only watching other movies. Go for a walk or something. Fashion does find its way into my poems by accident because there’s a lot of coded messages in fashion, and what people wear, how people dress themselves, fashion as part of everyday life. Even if I am kind of super off fashion, as in the industry, at the moment. I just like buying clothes. In my head, that’s my relationship to it, but it’s kind of hard to discard that conceptual approach to things once it’s been drummed into you.

There is a picture of a dress in ‘YOPO’.

Symbols in clothing for me and how they’re read is very specific to the ways I have interacted with fashion. I wrote about Comme des Garcons once because I was thinking of the Tom Ford movie Nocturnal Animals and they had this art bitch in it who’s unbearable and elitist and wears clothing that’s hard to grasp as a result. In another poem I wrote about death, I wrote about Margiela Tabis, which are just these shoes that all these art bitches wear, and I would be like really annoyed if I got buried in them. What I’m trying to say is that fashion isn’t necessarily about symbols in my work, but how I translate it, and in turn how that is read. I also think a lot about how fashion is about the body and being in the body, which is something I try to bump against in my poems.

What I’m trying to say is that fashion isn’t necessarily about symbols in my work, but how I translate it, and in turn how that is read.

I was going to say that I’ve noticed that a lot of our close peers are often interdisciplinary artists, like Hannah Wu writes essays and she also makes music, and Jamie Marina Lau writes novels and makes music. And you’ve just said that fashion definitely comes into your work. Can you speak to this trend towards multimedia, interdisciplinary work—why so many people are drawn to so many different art forms now?

A lot of writers are interdisciplinary, but we don’t know about it. Tommy Pico is a screenwriter and a poet and also loves to cook, do you know what I mean? It’s hard to not bring the things you’re interested in into your work and I think we have more of an emphasis on different ways that can be conveyed. And the way we think, even though words are a huge part of that, I think our relationship to words is so—there’s such a myriad of things that come up when you say a word. I think people are interested in exploring that relationship. Even thinking about this conversation. You talk about one thing and end up somewhere else; we just have very tangential brains, and we are distracted, and we like as many different forms as entertainment. Things just keep moving. There are new ways to express things. I want my poems to feel like an onslaught on the senses, so I need to try new things for that to happen. But I also just get bored.

It’s a way to keep it fun and interesting as well.

I have a short attention span so that’s definitely part of it.

Oh, me too. Do you as a poet and artist perceive art to be a site of failure, or words to be a site of failure?

I really actively try not to fetishise anything in my life and that includes art and writing, so yes, they are absolutely sites of failure. I think that so much poetry is about gesturing towards something. It never really gets there, but that’s okay, the gesture is still a thing. I’m processing the world and failure is part of that! I’m not a writer because I want things to be perfect or successful, which are innately annoying ideas anyways, I’m a poet because I like to complain and stare at the ceiling or into the void for ages and call that “work.”

You often write about writing poems while you write poems—

I didn’t realise!

You do! It feels really intentional when you do so. But you’re a poet who’s very committed to play and I love that. When poetry is taught in schools, they are often poems of seriousness and severity. It creates this wider perception of poetry as this serious, severe thing. What draws you to your commitment to play among this big tradition and what do you hope to achieve? Can poetry be fun?

Definitely for some. Some people are going to think it’s painful no matter what. I think poetry is for people who are fine with not understanding things. I think many people have to have a really clear answer, a really clear understanding of things, which I find maybe… suss? I don’t know about that approach to life personally, but I think poetry can definitely be fun. The first few poems I wrote were not fun. It felt like I was putting on a voice that echoed what I thought poetry was, and then I was like, this is so boring. And then I think just through wider reading, I can actually write jokes because writing jokes is what makes me happy even if they’re just personal jokes to myself. I think there are so many writers out there who have influenced my writing like Tommy Pico and Hera Lindsay Bird, Chelsey Minnis, all these people who are really funny—

Chen Chen.

Chen Chen, yeah—but they’re also really sad. I think humour is just something that comes along with sadness. In the context of my work and the things I’m concerned with, humour reflects how I actually deal with things and the way I see things. I’m interested in how it can deflect, hide but also show things in a different light. If I can’t be a bit silly, and laugh at something, it just doesn’t feel real for me. Also, it just comes back to getting bored. I don’t wanna get bored of myself or explorations of self, which is what poetry is. Or else it just becomes a terrifying escape room of my neuroses buzzing about and I don’t want to be trapped in there.

I think maybe that’s been my problem recently. I’m totally bored with how I write about myself at the moment.

To be honest, life is pretty funny, and I think that’s just always something that’s going to enter my work. Isolation has been a weird time to write. Writing right now is just like who cares. There’s so much else to care about!

There are surprising turns that your poems make, like in ‘every poem is a love poem,’ you write, “things knot / & felt & twist into each other / & still don’t make sense / but a poem is a made thing & / if that’s not love then / wtf.” Because I know you and hang out with you, I can hear exactly how you say it. Do you make a concerted effort in your craft to sound like your speaking voice?

I talk and think like a bored Valley girl, lots of vocal fry and a little bit Kimmy K which is the result of being sensitive but also using a cbf/idgaf veneer to hide my tumultuous internal life or something. I also write a lot through iPhone notes, sending myself emails, being lazy and using acronyms and read the poems out loud to myself, which probably makes my poems sound even more like me.

To be honest, life is pretty funny, and I think that’s just always something that’s going to enter my work.

Those are some techniques I might try, thank you for offering them. Do you wanna start promo-ing your chapbook now? Can I ask you to tell me more about it?

At the moment, it’s called salmon cannon me into the abyss and I started writing it when my dad died, and it goes through long stretches of me not even looking at it. Salmon cannon refers to this cannon that was created to shoot salmon over hydroelectric dams that block their natural swimming path. As part of my research, I’m looking at mortician and burial practices and looking at celebrity morticians, like Amber Carvaly! She was on Keeping up with the Kardashians, when Kim wanted to learn how to do corpse makeup? I’m still working it out but it’s a lot about the wild and also sad and mundane process of death and grief. I’m also still trying to work out how to talk about the dead.

Do you have any advice for emerging poets?

I hardly think I’m qualified to give anyone advice because I’m a pretty inconsistent writer and I write like one poem a month at most if I feel up to it, but I think a lot about this thing Ocean Vuong said, which is: “Attention is the most common and purest form of generosity.” It’s about paying attention to other people and their lives and your life and what’s happening around you.

Who are you inspired by?

I hate this question because all I want to talk about is the people I’m obsessed with and I really can’t condense it all to one answer, but I love: Rihanna, BTS, June Jordan, Ariana Reines, Hannah Black, Tommy Pico, Hera Lindsay Bird, Wendy Xu, Sophie Robinson, Morgan Parker, Chen Chen, Jackie Wang, kiwami who is this Youtube person who makes knives out of literally every material, and I also really love Maangchi, who’s this very iconic Korean chef. This is literally just a few… oh yeah, my mum, my friends, my dog Toulouse <3

What are you listening to?I’m listening to a pretty unhinged mix of K-pop like BLACKPINK, SUNMI, BTS, Shinee, MONSTA X. The Used for emo nostalgia. Maybe the only newish music I’ve been listening to is Sega Bodega’s Reestablishing Connection, which is a covers EP done over Facetime, it’s also really nostalgic.

What are you reading?

I’m currently reading Please Bury Me in this by Allison Benis White which I mentioned earlier, it’s so sad and I can’t make it through the book without crying so I have also been reading Ariana Reines, which makes me feel things too but in a more ummm… in a way that makes me feel connected… to the world?

How do you practice self-care?I kind of feel weird about how “self-care” has become Goopified from a radical political act. I suppose if you mean things that keep me feeling ok, at the moment I’ve been going swimming at night in Animal Crossing, having naps, going for walks around the dog park near my new house and being horizontal.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

I grapple a lot with identity, in the sense that I have a complex relationship with Malaysia, that in living here, which is a privilege, I lack language and ties to family, which is exacerbated by my dad’s death. It feels like he’s another link that I’ve lost to my heritage, my culture. So, at the moment, a lot of my feelings around my “Asian” identity are related to loss and grief.

I feel complicated about the term Asian-Australian as a settler on stolen land isn’t erased by whatever oppression or racism I experience. I’m also aware of Asian-Australianness and its proximity to whiteness, its complicity, the lateral violence that exists within these communities and how “Asian” exists as a constructed term (which is often associated with being East Asians), it’s not like Asia exists as one big monolith. I also think it’s interesting how in America, Asian-American was a term intended to unite activists, to express solidarity in a time and how Asian-Australian can sometimes feel more like an umbrella term. The more I think, write and read, the more important I think specifics and nuance are—I also want to add that my criticisms come from a place of care. I think I have to constantly be interrogating myself on my privileges, ideas and perceptions and that includes the notion of being Asian-Australian.

At the end of our interview, Panda and Darlene read a poem to one another. Darlene reads ‘The Orange’ by Wendy Cope, then Panda read an excerpt from Please Bury Me in This by Allison Benis White.