Maria Hardin in Conversation with Christine Shan Shan Hou

Maria Hardin: As if sculpted from the residue of dreams, the poems in A Promise move between devotion, violence, and play. Reading the book feels like, I mean this in the most loving way possible, doomscrolling through a sacred but slightly cursed FYP. The speaker moves between the mystical and the pornographic with equal gravity, collapsing registers of holiness and the grotesque until they become indistinguishable. How do you situate A Promise in relation to your earlier work? Does it close a cycle or open a new one?

Christine Shan Shan Hou: A Promise is the beginning of a new cycle.

MH: Did you live inside this work before you recognised it as a book? Or, did you always conceive of these poems appearing in book form?

CSSH: I don’t think I lived in the poems so much as the poems lived inside of me. I just didn’t know it at the time. 

MH: What was the origin of the book’s voice?

CSSH: Me, my hormones, and my yearning.

MH: What was your writing process like for A Promise? Did you write on your phone? In a notebook? On a napkin? Did the medium shape the poem?

CSSH: The book was initially conceived in the spring of 2023. At the time I was feeling a bit stuck so I turned towards ekphrasis and haiku as a way of getting myself out of the rut. One journal that I visit frequently for “inspiration” is The Public Domain Review, an online journal that explores strange and forgotten works from history that have all fallen into the public domain. I acquired their gorgeous physical catalog, Affinities, which has a curated selection of images and made myself write one poem a day for about 20ish consecutive days. I selected each image through a mixed process of intuition and chance. These PDR poems were intermixed with other poems that I had written over the past 4 years to make a collection. Some of the poems that were written in direct response to images from PDR are: “Kern Baby”, “A Fashionable Tale”, “Dead Star Life”, and “Across the Sea” along with many more. 

My writing primarily takes place on my notes app. I’ll collect lines / details / quotes / stray observations over a period of time and then arrange them into a poem directly on the desktop version of the app, since I type significantly faster than when I text or handwrite. Once I feel like I have a draft I move it over to google docs and delete it from my notes app so I don’t edit it on a whim, rather with intention. 

MH: The book alternates between longer lyric poems and haiku. How did you develop this rhythm? 

CSSH: I view the haikus as pauses; a moment to step back from the longer lyrical poems and take a breath. A palate cleanser before (re)entering the lyrical sea. 

MH: What kind of editing or sequencing logic guided you in choosing the order of the poems? Were you arranging intuitively, musically, narratively, or perhaps something else?

CSSH: I arranged these poems intuitively and loosely narratively. Sharing the narrative would spoil the fun, so I like to keep it all inside my head. It’s nonsensical and impossible to put into words.

MH: How did the haikus come about? Were they also born out of a durational writing practice?

CSSH: Haikus are the first place I turn to when I feel stuck with my writing. They are a distillation of a single moment in time, a feeling, or a physical site/artwork; an acute observation. For instance the haiku [The delusion of…] was written on a whim at a children’s science museum and [humiliation] was written during a time I experienced sexual rejection. Stopping to write a haiku is like hitting the pause button on life. 

MH: You write amazing titles. The Table of Contents feels like a constellation of mini poems. But the titles in relation to the actual poems are also doing a lot on the page. At what stage of the writing or editing process do your titles happen? 

CSSH: Thank you! The titles come to me at different times—sometimes before the poem is written, sometimes in the middle of writing, and sometimes days later after the poem has been written. My favorite is when I am in the middle of writing a poem and then suddenly come upon a line that makes perfect sense as the title. 

MH: What did the word “promise” mean to you when you chose it as the title of the book? Has your perception of the word stayed stable or changed shape since finishing the book?

CSSH: A promise is a heartfelt declaration of assurance or certainty. A personal guarantee that is ignited by the faith of the one being promised / the promisee. The poems in A Promise are written from the blind faith that nature already has a future planned out for you. Yes, your physical body will turn into dust, but your essence will remain. It will be subsumed by nature, by God. You will become unsinkable. 

The title is also in reference to one of my favorite albums, Xiu Xiu’s A Promise (2003). The opening track “Sad Pony Guerilla Girl is” about loneliness, the desire to be loved, and the self-hatred for having such desire. A Promise is written from the perspective of the sad pony guerilla girl. 

MH: There’s an undercurrent of mysticism in many of these poems. “The Earth Is Stretched So Thin These Days” cites Fanny Howe and plays with the idea of art as inappropriate suffering. Do you feel a kind of lineage or correspondence with her?

CSSH: Yes! Fanny Howe is one of my favorite writers of all time. I love how she examines the history of mysticism, faith, religion and social politics with a childlike sense of observation and wonder.

MH: “Call My Cunt” and “Let’s All Die Together!” both seem to be invoking an obliteration of self that comes from a very mystic way of thinking about reality but maybe I am reading too much into those poems? Is the use of repetition throughout the manuscript related to mysticism or devotion?

CSSH: I love how much you’re reading into it! It’s never too much. I believe there exists a higher order, and making art, or in my case poetry (and ashtanga yoga) reminds me of its existence. I also think that this higher order can only be reached through the annihilation of self or the ego. I look at my repetition / “list” poems as a ritual that helps clear the path, or build a ladder just to catch a glimpse of this higher order. When I repeat something regularly I start to pay attention to the smaller—it’s in those details where I learn the most about myself. These poems are also very intuitive. They write themselves. I usually come up with one line and the rest come tumbling out. I don’t know how to explain it, so leave it to Fanny Howe:

Sometimes the syntax of poetry helps me to see what life is really doing, and find the key to the open air 
— Fanny Howe, Night Philosophy

MH: Heaven is two rocks / god put in dirt for touching / we will never touch In a book full of sex, I think this is the most erotic poem. The tension between matter and longing. Transcendence collapsing into geology. Heaven isn’t radiant or celestial—it’s earthbound matter imbued with potentiality. When did you know that this would be the final poem?

CSSH: When I realized that desire only exists in its inability to touch it. 

MH: I was curious what kind of question a LLM would ask you about a poem that is a little bit sci-fi. So, here it is: “Computer Program with Permanent Desire” reads as both love poem and critique of AI intimacy. How do you think about desire in relation to technology and simulation? (Feel free to ignore if it feels gross or boring to answer.)

CSSH: I think technology teaches us new objects to desire as well as new ways to desire. 

“Computer Program…” is a love poem to an artist that I met in person over a decade ago. I hadn’t thought about this artist in a long time until they showed up on my instagram feed. I ended up fabricating an entire fantasy world around this person just from following their social media. Then I realized that my yearning wasn’t for the artist, the person, but for the technology that created this vision of them. It was the technology that directed me to the object of desire. It was the technology that taught me new ways to desire. And it was the technology that continually fed my desire. The artist was my Objet petit a. I wrote a poem about a particular person who will never know it’s about them because in many ways it never was about them.

My only thoughts about simulation is that I hope to experience simulative sexual intercourse with a penis within my lifetime. 

MH: As I was reading the book, I kept thinking about Vi Khi Nao’s Sheep Machine, which also takes a conceptual approach to ekphrasis. Then I reached “The Night The Grass River Overflowed” which was written for her and later saw Vi mentioned in the acknowledgments. How has her experimental approach to writing informed your own?

CSSH: One of the many things Vi’s writing has taught me is that poetry is written in response to something else, so let the response be the beginning. Tear down the barriers of what you think is and isn’t poetry. Allow everything—ideas, images, feelings, observations, personal experiences, history and current events—in. Allow everything to be in conversation with each other all the time. Let all language bleed into each other.