The Sacredness of All Things: Poet Wen-Juenn Lee
in Conversation with Darby Brown
Wen-Juenn Lee writes poetry on unceded Wurundjeri land. In her writing, she is interested in gaps, leaks and spillage, which often take the form of place, memory, and divinity. Her work has been published in Meanjin, Cordite Poetry Review, Going Down Swinging, among others. She was a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellow for 2022, and previously served as a poetry editor at Voiceworks. She was awarded the Tina Kane Emergent Writer Award for this year.
The following transcript has been edited. A version of the conversation is available in the audio interview above.
Darby Brown: When did you first start writing poetry? When did you decide to pursue writing as a career? And what were the stops along the way?
Wen-Juenn Lee: I guess I was always a reader when I grew up. I think my parents were really big influences in that way. They're both quite theologically minded. I was introduced to a lot of concepts like grace and salvation and C. S. Lewis from a young age. When I actually started writing was at university, and I wanted to be a fiction writer. I wanted to do short stories, but I got this job over the summer helping out a supervisor looking at New Zealand poetry. I think it was there that I realized that it was poetry all along, and that what I was trying to do in fiction was actually just poetry in its wholeness. I wanted to capture a very specific image or a very specific feeling in a specific line. All of the stuff that I was doing in short stories was just for that one line. So I didn't care about the beginning, I didn't care about the end, I just cared about that little bit. And immersing myself in a lot of New Zealand poets helped, and contemporary writers as well. So I began to think, I guess, more poetically. Beforehand I thought that it had to rhyme or that it had to have very formal structures. But after that job, I realized that I did want to do poetry.
When I moved to Melbourne, I took it much more seriously. But I found it really difficult to try and sustain my practice while I was trying to do writing after hours. So I made a very clear decision that I had to work part-time. I just have the privilege of having a very good job that supports my income and also having opportunities that have now supported my writing.
I realized that it was poetry all along, and that what I was trying to do in fiction was actually just poetry in its wholeness.
Voiceworks, which is a literary journal for emerging writers up to 25, really helped me because it introduced me to this community of everyone who was like-minded and who knew emerging poets, and just reading a lot of submissions, realizing everyone in Melbourne is submitting and different things like that. So I got very acquainted with a lot of Australian lit. Then through that, I became much more versed in other Australian literary journals, and then from there you kind of build up different relationships with different editors. There was a period after Voiceworks where I was just writing a lot, submitting here and there. And now I'm working on my debut poetry collection. I think it's mainly trying to know as many kinds of journals and acquaint yourself with the ones that you like.
DB: What influences do you have in your writing? You mentioned the New Zealand poets and some contemporary ones as well. I'd love to hear about that.
WJL: In the writing world, I feel like I am influenced by a lot of canonical writers and a lot of American writers. Annie Dillard is a huge influence. I think she writes poetically, for sure, and her attention to nature I think you see in a lot of philosophers. I really like Iris Murdoch and some of her ideas around attention and love. Theologically, C.S. Lewis. I think he's an incredible apologist. I think it's the way that he has these turns of phrases like "Mere Christianity" I really love. What's the other one called? The one where he talks about grieving his wife.
Writers like Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, Waiting on God—these are all very cryptic, but also like little glimmers of truth. Fiction writers like Siri Hustvedt—I really like her short stories. I also like the way that she co-opts or uses a lot of fine art. For Australian writers, I really like John Forbes. He's a poet; he's really interested in concrete kinds of banal street images. One of his influences was Gerald Manley Hopkins, who's quite well known. Who else? I feel like it really depends on the day. Sometimes you'll have ideas that you're obsessed with, and then you have particular writers that speak to that. But I feel like the people that I do tend to return to are Annie Dillard and often C. S. Lewis. I've also recently gotten into a lot more Malaysian poets who have either immigrated and then had to kind of work within the canon. So people like Wong Mei or Shirley Lim.
DB: What themes or concepts do you tend to explore in your poetry? Like you were saying, it kind of depends on the day, but do you notice any images or topics or things that you continue to obsess over and have to explore?
WJL: In the beginning I was really obsessed with mouths and anything to do with the lips, speaking, silence, that kind of thing. But I feel like something underpinning it or is present in some way is often light and water. I think about the way that light moves and also what it implies in terms of illumination and darkness, and similarly what water does, often carrying memory or moving or being both—something that is subtle but also can eradicate and erase things. I think often people have talked about water in terms of the diaspora, I guess because it's something that is kind of leaky and doesn't really have a form. Some people who are part of that would say it’s very similar to displacement or exile.
DB: You mentioned that briefly, but I really liked your bio saying that you were interested in gaps, leaks, and spillages. Would you want to expand briefly on that?
WJL: I think it's the gaps in speech often that I'm interested in, but also the gaps in space or intention. I think the thing that maybe we can all connect with is the idea that whatever you are saying cannot fully be understood or digested by the person that is receiving it. Yet we still try, and we still have that attempt of connection. But there will also be things that we don't say, which are just as important. And then it's like, what is that duality of the things that we do try to communicate and then the things that we do hold close to us and then the things that unconsciously or subconsciously slip without us knowing? Which is interesting, because one of the things that I have been obsessed with recently is psychoanalysis, because I think that's often the way in which people are often thinking about how the things that you say versus the things that you do, like contradictions, or [how] little ways in which things contradict each other to speak of a greater truth. Often the way that people present their truth is not necessarily what is true. So yeah, I think that's the gaps. And then I think leaking and spillage are very similar, where it's often something that we are trying to control. We obviously have a thing that we want to control, and leaks and spillages are things that are betrayed. They're not things that we actually want to be spilled, but they come out eventually.
DB: That's so profound. I love that image of nothing can be fully translated to another person, but we still try. It makes human connection beautiful.
I am going to shift gears slightly because I do want to hear about your thoughts on the intersection of faith and creativity. You mentioned earlier that your parents are very theological and you grew up in that environment. How do you feel like that aspect has influenced your poetry or just influenced you as a person in general?
WJL: I think they [my parents] are people who pay attention to very small things, and everything matters in that way. Both of them are creative in different ways, and they are very playful about that, I think. They have this sense that there is always room for you to try and express yourself, and that expressing yourself is earnest or has meaning. So the way that my dad loves gardening and the way that he will have this particular discipline to do that, even if he doesn't want to. And my mom, she loves doing a lot of flower pressing. So I guess I would say a way of being that feels geared towards everything can be precious. Especially with reading as well; that should reflect that.
There is something about poetry that specifically talks to truthfulness in ways that we just can't do with normal communication.
I think I am interested and I do love, obviously, things like irony, but I think that underneath it, there must be this understanding that things are important. I think I'm a very holistic person, or I'm very precise about how I live and also how I write because of that. So, yeah, with even things like reading, I think it was very important why I liked something and not necessarily to do with form or things that were academic or because they're part of the zeitgeist, but in terms of how they made you feel. That's the same, I think, with cinema and with fine arts. I think there's been a similar quality of particular narratives that I think my parents like, and that's often something surprising, I guess, about the human condition or relationships.
There's this one book that my dad introduced me to, maybe around high school, which was by this person called Timothy Radcliffe, who is, I think, a monk at Blackfriars. The book is called What is the Point of Being a Christian? It is a bit of a cliché title, but it's really beautiful. He brings in, I guess, like a lot of theologians do, a lot of writers and poets. I think that's an interesting thing, that obviously there is something about poetry that specifically talks to truthfulness in ways that we just can't do with normal communication. I think that that's why even the way poets talk about their poetry can feel so metaphysical and sacred. I think that's what it is, so everything feels sacred, and I think my parents definitely imbued a sense of sacredness or at least a reverence for everything that we do.
DB: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
WJL: Often it’s things that I've been paying attention to and I circle to, and then I realize, the only way that I can process it is often through poetry. It's very interesting because I remember that I felt compelled to write, and sometimes I feel itchy if I don't. I was talking to my dad about it, and he said, “That's kind of how I feel with prayer.” Which I thought was interesting, that obviously, you have to be compelled to it, and I think they're doing the same thing.
DB: That's really interesting. So do you feel like poetry helps you to connect with spirituality and with God?
WJL: That's such a hard one. In some ways it does, but it's also really hard when you begin to think that you have an audience in mind, and then there's something that kind of comes down and there's some sort of barrier. I was talking to my friend about this, and she said the problem is you're trying to talk about God, you're not talking to God. Obviously there’s St. Augustine, where all his Confessions are to God. So I think in some ways it's helped me to articulate some of my ideas better or to process my emotions, but it's always been a really blurry line if it's actually connected me to God. I think it might be something that happens after. I’ve thought about if there will come a point where language will fail, and the ways to connect with God and to presence and all of that has to be without my writing. But it's so hard because I guess part of it is that the way I interact and process the world is through poetry. So it does make me feel closer to the world in some ways. But there's also an element that maybe as soon as it becomes something that you feel is a product, then something happens and it doesn't feel true anymore.
DB: That all makes so much sense. I feel like I also relate to a lot of what you're saying. So I guess, more generally speaking, how do you feel spirituality and creativity influence each other? And what do you feel like happens at that intersection between the two?
WJL: I guess at the intersection of spirituality and creativity is something that is often spontaneous, something out of love, and something that has to do with creation. There's this really beautiful thing that I think W.H. Vanstone said it's a really long anecdote, I hope that's okay.
DB: Go for it. I want to hear it.
That's an innately human thing—to want to create little things that mean something.
WJL: He was a priest at a church, and there were these schoolboys who didn't have anything to do. So, he gave them this holiday task, and the whole task was to create this diorama of a nearby stream or something like that. In the beginning, he just did that because he wanted to entertain them and keep them occupied. Then as time went on, he noticed that [the task] began to really grow in terms of both appreciation and in terms of time. Lots more boys would be spending time on it, and there was way more value, and he would start to look at it and appreciate it, and he could see that it was like this real work of love. He kind of talks about that sense of it beginning to be something that was really meaningful because they put more time in it and they put more attention towards it. He said that it was kind of almost like us and likened it to God, and the way that we also create things and how that's an innately human thing—to want to create little things that mean something. When I read that, I was like, this is what it is, that intersection of you spend more time with it, and in that spending time, you give it meaning and value. And it grows as well. I don't think it's a static thing. I don't think the work is just something that you put time in and then it just stays there. I think the work obviously changes you, and it's this kind of reciprocal relationship. I think the intersection, like, where they meet is that sharing space and also respecting that thing, that it can also be spontaneous and that it can take its own course. Because I do think that that's what writing does. You will go in with an idea, but you often do not follow the idea. And if anything, the idea follows you or changes, and then…
DB: It drags you somewhere else.
WJL: Exactly! It drags you to a different room and you're like, okay, don't like this. And that's probably the same with any spirituality in general is you think it's one thing, but you actually realize it's another thing. And it's like an ongoing thing that you have to constantly go back to and work at or not even work at, but constantly be shaped by, and then it shapes you.
DB: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So have there been any challenges with being a spiritual person and a writer?
WJL: Yeah, absolutely. I think I kept it really separate at the beginning, where I don't think people knew that I was probably spiritual in writing circles, and people at my church didn't know I was a writer or probably didn't value it. It's only been, I guess, relatively recently that I realized that maybe in the past, the subjects of my work were probably opaque enough, like light or water that they can be relatively… and poets always have that kind of assumed, like, oh, they're all airy fairy, like metaphysical or whatever. There’s this leeway. But I think when you start to name it really explicitly, say, if you have some sort of poem that's in response to a religious iconography or something, then that's when you're being a bit more upfront. I think it's only been recently that I've done that. But it's really interesting because they should really be complementary, arts and spirituality. I think both are really big on feelings and how we feel, and being truthful about it and not having to kind of pander or to hide. I think both of them are very unconventional in some ways because it's not necessarily to do with the status quo or like capitalism or whatever it is, it's like remaining true to what you believe. But weirdly, I think they obviously have been associated with very different, I would say political ideologies. I think it was definitely actually more in art writing circles that there would be some surprise that I was religious. And I think it's only been recently that writing has actually been a really good way of bringing things like a religious painting or an idea that I think is relatively quite Christian in nature into something that's maybe neutral. Rather than just talking about it.
DB: Could you share a bit more about your writing process? How do you start writing a poem? How many drafts do you tend to write? And the hard question, how do you know when a piece is done and ready to be published?
WJL: Often it really depends. I've realized there are probably two poems that exist in my world. There's the poem that's essentially written in one go, and how it's written stays the same—like there's no draft; it is what it is. It's often being in a particular state of mind and receptiveness or porousness that I just cannot plan. I kind of almost just vomit it out, and it's just perfect. But those are really rare.
I think most often the other side of the poem is the one where I'll have a seed of an idea, or usually it will be a line. So a line comes to me, and then I build around that. It's either responding to a line that I want to explore—so I might not even know what the line means, but I want to kind of work around it—or it'll be responding to either a painting or a film, and then I'll kind of chip away at it. Usually, I’m like, What does this even mean? I think that’s when I know it's finished, because there's a real sense of affirmation, and I just feel like there's an affirmation when it comes to the ones that come out of me and there's nothing to do about it. While the one that you chip away at, and you are doing editing while you're writing it—those are the ones that I find much more difficult because you can just keep on editing and whittling away. It doesn't become anything. So I think it is a matter of remembering the passion. What I've tried to do with those ones–and usually, those ones are much more conceptual, while I think the ones that are process-ey are much more feeling-based—those ones that have ridiculous numbers of drafts. It’s because it's often to do with something that is religiously or philosophically technical, and I don't really know how to get at it, or I feel dissatisfied with my answer or my poem's answer, and the times that I have felt like it's complete, it's really hard to plan. I think it might be just that I usually will have to dedicate a lot of time to that poem, so I can't really spread my attention on multiple poems. It's like, no, I need to complete this one poem. And I'll chip away at it every day or something until I feel satisfied with the answer.
DB: Do you have moments where you feel discouraged with writing or even go through writer's block? And if so, how do you get through that? How do you push through the other side?
WJL: Yeah, I definitely have moments of feeling discouraged. I think it's usually when I read, but then it's actually kind of a blessing as well. I'll read people like poets that have essentially said the thing that I've wanted to say, and I go, so that feeling that you've somehow conveyed to me is perfect and fully formed. It's not really discouraged; I think that's just more like awe and being like, okay, there's nothing for me to add.
The other times I felt discouraged was definitely when I looked at a poem that I've worked on. And the weirdest thing is there'll be days where I'm like, that's a fine poem, it's fine, but I still don't have that strong yes. Then the next day I'll look at it and I'm like, no, this is a garbage poem, this is absolute garbage. But I think the way to overcome it is honestly to step away from it. I'll go for a walk, or I'll engage in another form of art, and usually sometimes there'll be something that happens, whether I'm hanging out with a friend or watching a film where the answer will come to me. I feel like usually you'll be able to somehow find that answer, and then you bring it back to your poem, and you try again.
DB: I want to hear a bit about what projects you're working on right now or that you've just finished recently. I remember you saying at the start that you're working on a debut collection, so I would love to hear about that.
WJL: So that was actually something that pretty much began when I was doing my Hot Desk Fellowship at the Wheeler Center, where there was a point where I thought most of the poems have been speaking about the same thing, just in different iterations or through a different lens, so I might as well keep going with that. And they're poems to do with, I would say, desire and divinity, really, and me trying to grapple with both. I guess I have a very specific relationship, as everyone does, with love. And what does love mean when you are also someone who I think has these different concepts and ideas around God and Eros versus something like Agape? Those are kind of the poems that I'm working on.
Remain close to what feels urgent to you.
I also feel like place is a really big part of it. I feel like place is always a setting in which that divine thing happens and also that erotic thing happens. It’s been an interesting process because I am someone who likes the feeling like you just completely have the poem out and you get it. But that's not sustainable, and the actual writing part is. And I've got poems that I just need to whittle away at.
DB: Do you have a favorite project or piece that you feel most proud of that you worked on in the past, or maybe one or two? I feel like it's probably hard to pick one.
WJL: I actually think I have been really enjoying I think the project but not the product was… There was one that I had to write in response to woodcuts that were at the University of Melbourne. They have a library, an art library, and there were sometimes exhibitions there. The exhibition on at that time was to do with woodcuts from Dante's Inferno. So there was Bruegel and William Blake, etc. I just had to write a response to that. And I loved that because it was probably the way that I was first introduced to poetry—responding to art, which I really liked. Then maybe more recently it was the Australian Queer Archives in Melbourne. It houses a lot of material; it's just like this big repository; and I found a lot of interesting letters from a gay Catholic community group. So these letters were beautiful and were honestly like poetry, really. And I wrote an essay about them.
DB: That's so cool.
WJL: Yeah, I think anything that's, like, archival feels like it's less about me, which I think is kind of interesting because you're using the material. It doesn't have to be yourself, but obviously, yourself is embedded in it.
DB: I think There’s something about responding to art or music, or something, another text, that immediately immediately gives you something to grasp, and the writing can flow from there. It's really cool.
So, finally, do you have any advice for other creatives who also have a faith or spiritual practice, or just advice for anyone wanting to pursue poetry?
WJL: So, advice for people who are trying, and I feel like I'm part of that group—it's easy to say but I think it's actually hard to grasp, is to somehow always stay very close to what you know and want rather than writing something that you perceive is highbrow or literary or part of the zeitgeist. I think there is sometimes a bit of pressure to write like that in order for there to be recognition. Because there's something about responding to art or music or just something like another text that just comes from external validation, I guess, and it doesn't ever feel like something that you can be proud of. So I say to somehow remain close to what feels urgent to you.
DB: That's really good advice. Thank you so much for letting me interview you. I really enjoyed hearing about your writing, your wisdom, and your thoughts on all these different heavy subjects.
Darby Brown is the assistant interviews editor of Vita Poetica.
