There are some artists whose work doesn’t just speak—it summons. Haolun Xu is one of them. His poems do not ask for permission; they arrive like memory, like prayer, like the kind of silence that teaches you how to breathe again. In Ultimate Sun Cell and beyond, Xu’s work navigates the blurred edges of myth and grief, faith and flesh, diaspora and desire—with a lyricism that is both brutal and tender, ancient and urgently now.
As someone who also writes from the intersections of longing and loss, I’ve often found myself circling the same questions that animate his poetry: What does it mean to write in the language that tried to erase you? What are we resurrecting each time we return to the page? And how do we build sanctuaries from the ruins we’ve inherited?
In our conversation, Haolun and I move through these questions not as answers, but as reckonings—slow and necessary. We speak of poetry as return, as resistance, as (re)memory. Of the sacred ache of diasporic poetics, and the devotion it takes to survive. What follows is an excavation—of intimacy, of inheritance, of the myths we carry in our bones.About the sacred ache of diasporic poetics, and how even the act of surviving becomes a kind of devotion. This interview is, in many ways, a love letter—to language, to art, and to those who dare to make themselves soft in a world that teaches us to harden. What follows is an excavation—of intimacy, lineage, and the myths we carry in our bones.
Darius Phelps: So much of your work wrestles with language—how it both reveals and conceals. I’m always asking myself: what does it mean to write in the language that once tried to erase me? How has your relationship to English been shaped by your migration, your memory, and your grief?
Halun Xu: I learned English really slowly and painfully, and when I moved from China as a kid I had trouble retaining any of the Chinese I learned beforehand. English is so difficult. Proper syntax is so hard too, and I struggle tremendously with the right order of words and sounds that make a sentence feel clear. I wrote my poems from 2020-2023 in a way where I basically gave up trying to write even coherent sentences. I have some poems with typos in them or with grammatical issues, and I would send them out anyways. Sometimes I think people would be very sweet and say that my poems are original and strange, but I wonder how much of my writing is just naturally accented or faulty in ways that bypass people’s expectations of how English sounds. This is a lucky break, I think, and that’s all that is at times.
Recently I have been writing in registers and tones that take after an older style, from the late twentieth century. I like Robert Hass and Larry Levis, I never read them until 2024, last year. Writing after reading a lot of their work makes my English sound a little more predictable. Maybe my poems now are less original or interesting. I don’t mind. But if I grieve anything, it would be my poems from a few years ago, and how I can’t really write too much like that exactly anymore. With that much zest. But this is the path my own language, separate from English or Chinese or whatever, has led me on. I guess I just have to play with the hand I’m dealt every few years.
DP: Your poems hold myth and metaphor so tenderly—especially in Ultimate Sun Cell. I’m drawn to how you blur the sacred and the everyday. In my own work, I often return to religious and ancestral imagery to make sense of loss. What stories are you trying to resurrect through your poetry?
I’ve become very skeptical of myths, even if I’ve been reading a lot of Greek plays the last few months and used them in my writing. In the chapbook I write a lot after Icarus and the Monkey King. I thought I liked how much these figures were able to fly, under a very strict set of conditions and limitations. That they were free in these painful ways. I’ve been thinking a lot of Jacob wrestling the angel. I think about that a lot, how it ended with people crossing safely and him taking on this terrible wound in his thigh. I don’t know if that shows up in my writing, and I don’t really notice these things until years later. Rita Dove once said when she visited Texas to talk to my MFA cohort that people write more honestly with persona poems, rather than the direct “I.” I think about that especially when I read books like Middle Earth, by Henri Cole. The process of using a mask of a face-covering to heighten one’s sense of truth, or dim one’s sense of self. But I also think mythologizing can be very dangerous for a writer, and often a bit too corny. It’s more of an anxiety than a genuine suspicion though. I’m filled with those lately.Oh, I have noticed that a lot of poems use metaphor or simile so aggressively. Sometimes I see poems use them two or three times in a stanza. What gives! Stop hurting my brain. I wish people spaced them out more. People should treat their similes and metaphors with more care and patience. But I’m careless a lot too, so this might just be a note for myself more than anyone else.
DP: I think of poetry as a practice of return—to the self, to silence, to all we’ve had to survive. How do you see poetry as a space of healing? What’s the wound your work keeps circling, and what does it ask of you?
HX: I’d like to imagine those habits of return usually come down to form. There’s probably a civil engineer out there right now realizing the first few bridges he studied were the best ones. Probably something to do with basics and keeping things simple. I really do think poetry can be a space for healing. I don’t know if it’s easy to find that in poetry as a person who writes poetry though. It’s like how I don’t think mermaids can drink water and enjoy it the same way humans can. When I don’t write a lot and convince myself I have nothing to do with poetry or fiction as a person, I’m able to enjoy poetry in a really fun way. It helps me avoid disaster, it helps me understand how to get through a horrible day, and also to save myself from people or places I love or adore but need to leave for my own sanity.
DP: As someone who teaches and writes at the intersections of race, grief, and identity, I believe the classroom can be a sanctuary. Do you see your writing as pedagogical? And if so, what does it teach—about love, about loss, about living between?
HX: I don’t think I see my work as pedagogical. Maybe rhetorical, that’s something people say to describe certain lines in poetry, right? But even the rhetorical can be just a nice crisp way to end a poem or finish out a stanza. The lines always sound really great, and it makes the poet feel really confident in their observations. I like doing that myself, it feels good. Like eating a big burger or having a cold soda. I do think strong poems do revolve around insight. I don’t think the insight actually needs to be understood by others, it’s probably more a matter of helping the poet out. An insight that probably helped them come to a conclusion or live past a certain painful point in their life, or protect and materialize a good memory or feeling they’ve had.
DP: The visual texture in your work reminds me of how I use poetic inquiry—where image becomes evidence, and metaphor becomes method. How does your background in film shape the way you approach a poem? Where do motion and stillness meet in your creative process?
HX: Sometimes it feels I have learned very little from filmmaking as a poet. The whole process of filmmaking is so terribly different from poetry that at times it felt I was basically learning French or plumbing or how to be a computer engineer. It was a very steep jump for me. I do think watching films however, is a whole different process. I loved watching movies and trying to record or translate my feelings watching a movie into poetry.At times, I remember there was a time where I didn’t think making any films, short or whatever, was possible for me. So I took all of my film ideas and made them into poems. It felt like sacrificing the idea into a big fire and watching it burn and be offered up. I miss that feeling, and I wonder if I’d do that more again and if it would be good for me. On the topic of filmmaking, I’ve been thinking of making another short film again. Maybe this time, I’ll apply more of my own logic as a poet into the film. Maybe I should have done that sooner.
DP: You’ve shared that the literary community has been formative for you. For me, healing doesn’t happen in isolation—it requires witness. How have mentorship, collaboration, and collective imagination shaped your growth as a writer?
HX: People complain about the literary world a lot. I complain about the literary world a lot. People tell me, Haolun, you have to make more friends who aren’t poets. I do, and sometimes I get terribly bored with them in an affectionate way. To probably the horror of a lot of the people from my hometown and myself and even other writers, I ultimately spend the most amount of time with other writers. Did you know I used to do stand-up comedy? I used to do it a lot, and the mics would intersect a lot with poets. The poets were always taken a bit more seriously, and I think they were more charming too and had an easier time socially. When I stopped doing comedy, it was partially because of this.
What I mean to say is that sometimes I think the driving factors for much of the poetry world are created by very social and very physical motivations. Like sports. We love to watch the people who we root for succeed, and we like to be surprised and excited when the people we don’t succeed as well. It’s all a very exciting challenge, and it brings us together. I don’t think it’s often about competitiveness, and nor do I think it’s about this spiritual aspect of poetry either.
I just think people love to cheer when a big thing happens, and people love to go for what they want despite the odds, and swing for the fence with all their friends watching. It’s very fun being a poet in this way.
DP: I often tell my students: the poem doesn’t have to be polished—it has to be true. When you sit down to write, what are you listening for? What does your process look like when you’re chasing emotional honesty over perfection?
HX: I talked to my friend Jimin Seo about this. He said that poems can be finished and they have polish, but they don’t have to be either and sometimes hilariously they are neither. I think about this a lot when I write poems lately, especially when I’m editing new poems or doing the terrible thing where I attempt to revise an old poem from years ago to see what happens.
I don’t know sometimes if I understand honesty or truth in a poem lately. Maybe clarity is better, or making difficult decisions to make the poem get to where it has to go. Some narrative poems, I just want to write it neat but with enough details that the person I want to show it to can read it without going insane. Sometimes I keep lines I think are hideous, but the poem would just be an empty assortment of words and form without it. Poems are often best when they’re a little ugly, and a lot of people both hate and love that including myself.
DP: Audre Lorde said, “Poetry is not a luxury.” In times like these, when erasure feels constant and rest feels radical, how do you hold onto joy in your practice? Do you see joy as a form of resistance—something worth fighting for on and off the page?
HX: People sometimes talk about that, poetry being a luxury. You know, back when I was a little kid it used to be a very special occasion to eat fast food. Once or twice, my parents would take us out and probably break the bank treating my sister and I to a very special lunch at random hotels in Pennsylvania or south Jersey.
Should we not have done that? Of course not. What the heck. People say stuff like that and then read poetry anyways. I often think we all should spend too much and not save a lot, and be very irrational and demand money and luxury when we want to. We should also spend that money on donations, funds, you get what I mean. I don’t know if I see joy as a resistance. But I’d say half the time, it’s very hard for myself to see people happy and enjoy themselves, and I’d say that’s really messed up of me. We spend so much time in this world sticking to silly rules. Rules about morals, beauty, order. Rules about love, rules about happiness. Even the word joy has all these rules.
But I think poetry or not, joy or not, I feel like emotions should be allowed to run wild and free. They should be something we cannot hold back, cannot predict. Poetry, art, the world, it should always grow beyond our own abilities or expectations and we should be able to grin and rise to that occasion. When I feel like I get too stiff or too bitter, I like to picture a big parade. People playing with oboes and tubas, instruments I don’t know how to play. Then one of the horses in the parade goes absolutely nuts, and runs off without hurting anyone too much. I like that. Maybe I’ll write a poem about that, and not tell anyone. I think at the end of the day, that’s the kind of joy that matters to me.
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..
Haolun Xu is a Chinese-American poet, fiction writer, and filmmaker. He is from New Jersey, and was born in Nanning, China. He is currently attending the MFA Program of the Michener Center for Writers, at UT Austin. His writing has appeared in literary journals such as Electric Literature, Narrative, Gulf Coast, Joyland, jubilat, and more. Haolun’s work is the recipient of the John Gardner Memorial Prize in Fiction, and has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best Of The Net. Haolun’s poetry chapbook, Ultimate Sun Cell, was published with New Delta Review in 2021, judged by Brandon Shimoda. His chapbook is available for purchase here. His narrative short film, Long Beach, concluded principal photography at the end of April 2022, and was a Semi-Finalist for the 2024 Dumbo Film Festival.