Esther Sun is a Chinese-American writer from the Silicon Valley in northern California. Recognized by Bennington College and the National YoungArts Foundation, she has published poems in Up North Lit, Vagabond City, Anthropocene, and more.

Esther’s poem "My Grandfather Dies On My Last Night In Iowa" appears in the Fall 2020 issue of Carve. Order your print or digital copy.

This piece is so full of emotion, and yet the language is really delicate and graceful.  How did you strike that balance in this poem and in your writing in general?

In general, I make sure to have a firm sense of what kind of mood the poem is calling for, whether it be delicate and graceful, forceful and sharp, etc. Sometimes, a strategy that works for me is first establishing the emotional core of the poem—the central memories and ideas—and then coming back later to shape or accent that core with distinct images and figurative language that create the mood I want.

This poem specifically was inspired by the musical nocturne, which was really important in helping me strike that balance between grace and emotion. I had recently discovered Jan Lisieski’s performance of Chopin’s nocturne in C sharp minor and was listening to it on repeat as I was trying to craft this poem, so that auditory element of sweet, nostalgic notes helped me internally separate the intensity of my emotion from the delicacy of the memory that I wanted to capture.

The metapoetic opening of the piece was really powerful for me in approaching this topic.  Why did you choose to begin the poem that way?

As both a writer and violinist, I’m constantly surrounded by discourse on the tangible power of art and literature in real life and have always believed in such power myself. In light of this, what I remember distinctly from my grandfather’s passing is that, during that time of processing intense grief, poetry and art felt so meaningless and inadequate to even begin to scratch the surface of my emotion. It was pretty jarring to experience this level of intimate grief for the first time and feel like such grief had stripped poetry of all the power I thought it had.

However, as years passed, I slowly redeveloped my belief in poetry’s power, experiencing it as a way to acknowledge and reflect on that time in my life. The process of writing this particular poem was difficult and almost violent in that its sustained focus on such a specific memory dug up old grief that I had avoided in previous attempts to write about my grandfather. Once I did spend time again with that old grief, the poem was able to facilitate gentle reflection on my memory of grandfather, like a balm for a wound I didn’t realize was still tender. I really appreciated that experience.

I found that the musicality and rhythm of the couplets kept this piece steady amidst the intensity of emotion throughout it.  How does music influence your writing?

I see every piece of music as a kind of poem in its own way, with character and a life of its own, and every poem as also a kind of musical composition. It’s beautiful how some poetic constructions or sequences will carry just the right pulse for their purpose and role in the poem at large, not necessarily by virtue of meter or rhyme or anything, but I guess just by chance. I try to find the right homes for those sequences within the poem—the places where they can do the best work. I love how the boundary between music and language really lends itself to being blurred; in music, we even call each musical thought a “phrase” as if the piece were a literary work. Likewise, it’s very important for me to acknowledge and capitalize on the musical element of all of my poems, whether it’s with rhythm, the sounds of the syllables, or interchanges of short and long phrases.

Sometimes, just to experiment and have fun, I’ll try to write a poem based around the expression marking of a piece of music. For example, since “allegro molto appassionato” is the expression marking for the opening of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in E minor (which I’m obsessed with), I tried to write a poem evoking that same mood, relying on what I heard in the music to inspire the images or ideas in the poem. I think the attention to musicality from that exercise bleeds into my other poems as well—even the ones not intentionally focused on a piece of music.

As both a poet and a journalist, how does your poetry inform or affect your journalistic writing and vice versa?

As a journalist and editor, I have to pay a lot of attention to objectivity in reporting, especially when the stories at hand have very personal connections to the writers. When we editorialize a news story whose tone needs to remain neutral, we dull the power of the story itself and lose our readers’ trust. A writing philosophy I’ve taken from journalism and applied to my poetry, as a result, is a belief in the power of letting the facts speak for themselves. It may feel too bare initially—skeletal, even—but ultimately I find that writing about traumas, injustices, or other emotional situations proves far sharper when I don’t try to dress up the situation too much with my own poeticism. There is power in this unadorned reality—the naked, indisputable truth.