There are writers whose work you encounter at the exact moment you need it—whose silences echo something you haven’t yet dared to speak. For me, Chiwan Choi has been one of those writers. But more than that, he has been a mentor, a guide, and a quiet force who’s taught me that poetry doesn’t always have to shout to carry weight. That sometimes the most powerful thing we can do on the page is stay—in the ache, in the absence, in the unspoken.
In collections like Sky Songs, The Yellow House, and Abductions, Chiwan maps grief not only as a personal rupture but as a political inheritance, a diasporic haunting, a collective wound. His poems linger in the spaces language often fails—where memory slips, where silence becomes both shield and offering. As someone who writes through poetic inquiry and narrative witnessing, I’ve turned to Chiwan’s work again and again as a reminder that to write through loss is to refuse erasure. That to document our wounds is to make space for healing—not by closing the pain, but by naming it.
This conversation is shaped by that deep admiration, and by the lessons I’ve learned from Chiwan’s presence on and off the page. What follows is a dialogue about disappearance, ritual, survival—and the enduring act of return.
Darius Phelps: In Sky Songs, absence becomes a kind of atmosphere—grief that drifts, lingers, and sometimes evaporates before it can be named. Not just physical loss, but the ache of what was never said, never claimed, never returned. How has grief shaped the architecture of this collection? And what form does silence take when you’re composing within the vastness of disappearance?
Chiwan Choi: That’s such a powerful question. Honestly, Sky Songs didn’t begin as a grief-centered project. I initially wanted to write something fun—something inspired by my love for pop music. But once I started writing, the grief came pouring in. The book ended up breaking into four sections—each one reflecting a different relationship and wound: my mother, father, myself, and finally, the concept of home. That last one didn’t fully reveal itself until a conversation with my therapist, who reminded me just how much not having a stable sense of home has shaped my life as an immigrant.
Silence, too, became something I couldn’t ignore. Even though the collection is inspired by music, I couldn’t write a single word without songs playing. The silence after the music stopped was unbearable—it felt like being thrown into a different reality I didn’t want to inhabit. So every word in the book was written with music in my ears, almost like a lifeline.
DP: In The Yellow House and Abductions, grief is not only personal—it’s ancestral, political, unrelenting. How do you navigate the weight of inherited sorrow without being consumed by it? What rituals or resistances do you return to when the page feels too heavy?
CC: Honestly? I don’t think I can avoid being consumed by it. What I’ve learned is that I need to focus on aftercare—because I can’t protect myself during the writing. Therapy has been life-saving in that way. I talk out the emotions that rise up—not just about writing, but about what writing brings up. When I didn’t have that kind of support, I felt like I could fall into the hole and never come out.
That’s actually why Sky Songs started as an attempt to write something lighter—I needed to survive. But even then, the grief found its way in. Still, there’s something about seeing pain from a different angle that allows discovery. Even if it still hurts, the shift opens up a possibility. And that possibility keeps me writing.
DP: Your poems leave traces—markers of survival, of refusal. How do you reconcile the tension between erasure and remembrance in your work? Is the poem a place to vanish, or a place to be witnessed?
CC: At this point in my life, I see the poem as a form of evidence. I tell young writers this too: we write to prove we existed. That we felt something. That we hurt. That we made mistakes. Sometimes the systems around us make us feel invisible or intentionally erase us—but poetry says, I was here. Over the years, simply stating that truth has brought me into communities I never dreamed I’d be part of. So much of my life now revolves around poetry. And I think, even with all the pain, how remarkable it is that writing gave me this life. That feels like resistance. That feels like reclamation.
DP: Your language is sparse, deliberate—each line a wound and a salve. Can you speak to how craft plays a role in your grieving process? What choices—form, pacing, repetition—do you lean on when writing through the unspeakable?
CCi: I started writing because I didn’t want to speak anymore. After immigrating, I felt like I didn’t belong anywhere—not with the Korean kids, not with the Spanish-speaking kids, not with the white kids. So I drew a lot. Everyone thought I’d go to art school. But then I found poetry. And I realized I could say so much with the few English words I knew. That’s what made me fall in love with it. I didn’t want to learn fancy vocabulary—I wanted to say everything with what I already had. That stripped-down clarity has stuck with me. Even now, after all the degrees and all the books, I’m not drawn to elaborate forms. I want truth, not tricks.
Sometimes I’ll throw in a formal element just to wake a poem up—or out of spite, to prove I can do it—but mostly, I stick to voice. That’s what no one else can replicate.
DP: As a Korean American poet, your grief often moves through displacement—of home, of language, of self. And yet there’s a pulse of joy in your work. How do you see poetry as a site of return and celebration? What does it mean to write toward joy when the wound is historical, collective, and still bleeding?
CC: That’s the hardest one, isn’t it? I know I can’t undo the grief—especially generational grief. It’s too big, too wide. Some things I know I’ll carry forever, even through therapy, even into the end of my life. But there was this dream I had once where I was writing a poem inside the dream. I couldn’t remember the words when I woke up, and that made me so sad—not because I lost the poem, but because I loved seeing myself in the act of writing. That moment—me, immersed in it, music in my ears, lost in the feeling—that’s joy. That’s sacred. And even if I’m writing through pain, I wouldn’t trade that joy for anything.
Darius Phelps is a poet, educator, and scholar whose work explores grief, identity, and liberation through poetic inquiry. He is a Poetry Co-Editor at Matter, Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and the author of the forthcoming My God’s Been Silent.
Chiwan Choi is the author of five books of poetry: The Flood, the Daughter trilogy—Abductions, The Yellow House and my name is wolf—and Sky Songs. He wrote, presented and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015. His writing has appeared in New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Zócalo Public Square and other publications. Chiwan is a partner at the experimental literary laboratory Writ Large Projects.