An Interview with Ginger Ko
By Laura Cesarco Eglin

Laura Cesarco Eglin: The insistence of the same title for each poem, the repetition. Is this a comment on the patterns in society? The inescapability of shared experiences? A sort of critique of society?

Ginger Ko: I caused myself so much trouble by deciding to (re-)name every poem in Letters to Anyone with the same title, “Message in a Bottle.” Organizing the poems became a pain when I couldn’t use distinctive titles to identify them in my mind, which pointed out to me the silliness of my old habit—of complaining about poem titles, of having to come up with them, granting each poem a unique tag or identity. I will never complain about titles again, because I see now how each titled poem can exist as a self-contained individual. I wasn’t thinking so much about how distinct poem titles work when deciding to elide every poem in my book into a mass, I was more thinking about constructing piece-wise a unified entity with one basic goal—reaching someone else in the world. I envision Letters to Anyone to be a mass deployment of these bottles with S.O.S. messages rolled up inside them, disseminated across the vast circulation and tidal streams of our earth’s waters. You know how poets in particular love to jump into the vehicles of metaphorical conceits, and mine for Letters to Anyone are centered around what humans emit and how we must live alongside what we produce—throngs of unthinking trash, cynical pollution, organized and individual projects of recovery and redress, and big systems with hidden players. In the end, it can feel like (to me, anyway, that) life is both unchangeably conflated and so difficultly individual and alone. Each of my “Message in a Bottle” poems tries to think about how we use language on each other, whether it is for connection or comfort or dominance or romance or validation or friendship or thrill or utility or admiration or….

LCE: I find the "conflations" or blurring of boundaries in the book fascinating: Sometimes it seems as though the author/persona has curated these messages. As if they were the ones that found the messages and put them together in the book. Sometimes the speaker seems to be the writer of the messages. Sometimes the speaker is also the reader. In addition, there’s a reaching out to an other and, at the same time, the speaker engages in a reaching out to the self. A bit like two conversations happening at the same time.
Another aspect of the complexity, duality, etc. in the book is that sometimes the message/text/poem is a message, and sometimes it's a “summons,” “prayer,” “pact,” (p. 9) or “This is either a confession or a seduction” (p. 17).
What's "real" for the speaker and what's "convincing fiction."

An investigation into the self, into relationships, who is the self in relation to…, and there is an unfolding of the self: the one that observes the “you”, the one that reads/observes the messages, the one that writes the messages, and even the one that is the message (in a bottle).

GK: I overthink everything, and I can’t let anything just be. I’m working on this with my therapist lol. But your observations about the poems feel very astute in that I always have an inside-and-outside mode, and I really try to give voice to this in-betweenness in these poems. Expressing myself to another person requires first an excavation of myself, which is always on ongoing process, and very, very laborious. I have achieved a high level of masking and functioning in my everyday life that makes up for the fact that I had a singularly traumatic and violent childhood that vacated a lot of my sense of self. I can fully recognize now, as a woman in my 40s with a growing child of my own, that I never had a childhood. From around age 6 I was fully onboarded into the psychology of the adults around me, and in the process of survival and resiliency, I adopted adult concerns and was an emotional and intellectual and physical/sexual workhorse for everyone else around me. I was responsible for leading my family through English-speaking bureaucracies, for feeling blameworthy when they had to spend time and money on me, for succeeding at the difficult (dysfunctional, toxic, rife with loyalties and betrayals) relationship dynamics that made daily navigation of life nearly impossible. The easy, resilient child can uphold myriad oppositional realities at once, because that becomes their job in life among abusive adults. The high level of vigilance and empathy I had to learn left very little room for authentic self-awareness and self-knowledge. Because I started acting like an adult before I could understand what it meant, it’s been an entire lifetime of trying to understand the forces at play upon myself, and the forces that I play upon others. When I make a move, I feel all the insecurity and emptiness of my background behind the move—did I make the right one? How can I ever know? When I react to someone or something, I feel the entire unsteady mechanism of my psyche—am I reacting as myself, or as someone else who doesn’t have my best interests at heart? 

LCE: Something that the book made me think about is distance (space) and time, because of the nature of a message in a bottle. The message in a bottle is found by someone at some point. There is a past, when the message was written and that the speaker (writer of the message) refers to, and the present of reading. Do you want to talk a little about this?

GK: I love the figure of the message in a bottle because it points out the lasting power of language across time and space. Growing up, whenever a message in a bottle figured in a cartoon or film or story, I was fascinated by the optimism that language can contain someone’s final hopes—to reach someone, anyone at all, before it’s too late. As a child without a competent adult advocate, I could hardly believe that I would ever reach anyone under any circumstance. Much as humans like to include messages and cultural artifacts with the stuff we send into space, in the hopes that aliens will recognize the products of our civilization (though I think any aliens will probably be either disgusted or unimpressed with what we get up to over here), a message in a bottle can represent an individual’s last claim for agency and self—and survival with the help of other people! The hope that someone else out there will receive the message in time, and act on the message to save the letter-writer’s life, is both a romantic notion and a realistic choice for someone who is abandoned or lost with no other options. The fact that language can be recorded in way that provides both longevity and transportability is a powerful idea that I tend to lose sight of in my everyday life. It makes me happy to be reminded of it and to marvel at, at times like this for instance—corresponding with someone who is both a friend and a generous reader over these interview questions. We don’t live too close to each other, so we don’t hang out as much as I’d like to, but I like that we can “meet” over the shared project of correspondence. It can’t take the place of an in-person conversation, but can still provide a space for back-and-forth that invites each correspondent to bring their changing selves to each moment of sharing or questioning. As a friend, there’s a lot of catching up that I’d like to do with you—I know that you’ve been reading, writing, traveling, experiencing, and socializing in all kinds of ways since we were last able to chat, and all that has impacted the thinking and questioning that you bring to this interview. As we continue the process, your everyday life and mine will continue and we will bring selves slightly different, slightly the same, to each of our future conversations, and I really love that fact. 

LCE: There is a theme of secrets in the book, which I relate to the theme of what language can do and cannot. What is kept inside, what comes out anyway, despite wanting to keep it “locked in.”. What is expressed and what is projected inadvertently.  Like reading and writing: Who is the writer writing to and who is the reader reading? What is being expressed and what is not? What is being read between the lines/silences, etc.? What is being communicated and what is not? Is language helping, hindering, failing?  There's an urge to communicate, to be understood, to find the other and the self, and, concomitantly, an awareness that language is not enough.

Language as enough or not enough.

Language as more than "ornamental and recreational" and yet, the speaker has to go. Not everything is solved with language. Because even language needs distance.

Together with this:  “this unspoken text / is another degree of stylized separation?” (p.34): Does the message in a bottle (the poem) unite the speaker and interlocutor/reader = Does it separate them?

GK: Yes, as much as I love the connecting and self-expressive powers that language provides, as I described in my previous answer, I am frequently disappointed in both the limits of people (myself included) and the limits of language. Sometimes we misuse language to manipulate, sometimes we withhold language to self-preserve or protect others (do they deserve it?), sometimes we use language to replace or revise actions, sometimes we use language to lie and/or harm. I think that’s both a failing of people, and a failure of our communicative possibilities. Lots of people don’t trust the language of others at all, or insist on misinterpreting them. Sometimes spoken and written language is completely inadequate for the situation. I don’t think self-expression and interpersonal communication can solve every problem, but I do think it’s very powerful because speech and writing is regularly weaponized as good-faith investigation or self-disclosure when it’s in fact scamming people and perpetuating harm. Communicating with another person often requires self-disclosure, which can be real or fraudulent or self-deluded, and an assessment of the kind of person the conversant is, whether capable or sympathetic or not. Humans are too complex and contradictory and individual for there to be widely-accepted codifications of language use, so then what can language really do for us? What does it really do for us? I never know if I’m posing these questions about language itself or the people who use it.

LCE: There is a constant attempt at communication and connection. Sending out a message in a bottle embodies this uncertainty because the sender never knows if the message will be read at all, if it will be received and read by the intended interlocutor. Maybe there is no intended interlocutor? Maybe these messages are calls to humanity, society, to the self? Maybe the messages are trying to understand people (the writers and readers of the message)? Maybe the messages are a looking back and analysis, a way of being done with something? All of the above? In any case, there’s an intimacy in the address to what seems to be a particular “you”.

GK: I’m not sure there’s an intended interlocutor for these poems except that I’d like for them to be a real individual person. I like that you use the word “intimacy” for my use of apostrophe because that’s a very classic mode for me, the one that seduces and invites closeness. Going back to the situation of my childhood again, I grew up around sex work and was often initiated into intimate emotional relationships with older people, so I am very good at being a companion, a good listener, a partner who asks the right kinds of flattering questions, inviting vulnerability from others with my own carefully-curated signals of defenselessness. I’m making myself sound manipulative, but when I was younger I did a lot of this without thinking about it. I was led and trained into it by the people I dealt with, and I don’t even want to say that all of my childhood abusers were these master manipulators either. A lot of it happened because very capitalistic and patriarchal long-standing systems are in place for women and children and marginalized people to be appealing and accommodating, to be entertaining and romantic, providing an adventurous journey to those with more money and power than them. My use of “you” in my poetry has always come from this place of power-play. 

LCE: The messages are for the reader as much as for the speaker. The need to write in order to learn about the heart. What is at the heart of this book?

GK: I love this question! I wish I had a happier answer, though I want to assure everyone that I’m not an unhappy person. The heart of this book is a deeply broken heart. An abandoned and lonely one. If the poems are able to reach any reader who is also heartbroken, then I’d like to offer the idea that through the reading of the poems, they and I are heartbroken together, not alone, and that togetherness—connection, proximity, sharing anything at all whether it’s an idea or an accountability, awareness, allyship—is a true currency. We can learn to live in ways that truly value other people and the connective possibilities they provide. Let’s replace competition with connection! It really could be that easy, I swear.