Jason Koo is a second-generation Korean American poet, educator and editor. Koo is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: No Rest (Diode Editions, 2024), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize and the Diode Editions Book Contest and a finalist for AWP’s Donald Hall Prize for Poetry; More Than Mere Light (Prelude Books, 2018), a finalist for the National Poetry Series; America’s Favorite Poem (C&R Press, 2014; Brooklyn Arts Press, 2020), a finalist for the CSU Poetry Center Open Competition; and Man on Extremely Small Island (C&R Press, 2009; Brooklyn Arts Press, 2020), winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award for the best Asian American book of 2009. He is also the author of the limited-edition chapbook & cassette tape Sunset Park (Frontier Slumber, 2017) and coeditor of the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (Brooklyn Arts Press & Brooklyn Poets, 2017). His work has been published in Best American Poetry 2022, Missouri Review, Poetry Northwest, Village Voice and Yale Review, among other places, and won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and New York State Writers Institute. He is an associate teaching professor of English and the director of creative writing at Quinnipiac University and the founder of Brooklyn Poets.
Like its title, the speaker of No Rest lives within the cacophony of life as a poet, a founder, and a professor with set teams to root for. The long poems in this collection embody the chop-chop of editing videos and the realities of getting on book lists and promoted as an Asian American male body. Life’s most important moments—a friend’s death, marriage—are contextualized politically by the presidential election without fear or filter.
Tiffany Troy: How does your first poem, “After the Election,” set up the reader for the collection that is to follow? For me, it immediately grounds the reader in a mode of iterative / Socratic self-interrogation, your signature humor, and the couplet form which you utilize in the long poems in No Rest.
Jason Koo: As readers of the book will know, what’s interesting about the choice to put “After the Election” first was that it was one of the last poems written.
I began the book in January of 2016 and thought it was done or mostly done by August of that year—when I turned 40. Originally, I thought it would unfold chronologically. Then, Trump was elected in November, and the morning after, I found out that one of my best friends from high school had killed himself, which was a total shock. I had just gone to his birthday party four days before. We’d fallen out of touch for a while before 2016, but because of what was happening in Cleveland sports that year, with the Cavs winning the title, we reconnected. And then he was gone.
What became clear the more I looked at the book after that was that I had to write another poem, which became “After the Election.” I wrote that at the beginning of the next year. The narrative of the book before that was more triumphant, like everything was working out great in 2016. The Cavs won the title. I met this woman I would eventually marry. I had a great 40th birthday. Then I realized that it was all bullshit—or maybe not bullshit, but one of the things I had been investigating was: what do we really know about ourselves? I was taking a very hard look at everything that I thought I knew about myself that year.
Maybe this is just what everyone does when they turn 40. Maybe not. But I was looking at my teaching, my writing, questioning everything. And I thought I had really done that, then I realized by the end of that year that I hadn’t gone nearly as deeply as I thought I had, or could have. So that kicked off an even deeper kind of investigation: getting more aware, self-aware, more self-critical. And then, you know, the years of the Trump presidency unfolded. I ended up writing a few more poems up until COVID happened.
When I was putting together the book, pretty early on after I wrote “After the Election” I realized that it had to be first. And then I knew I would go with this different time structure. It wouldn’t be a linear time structure; that poem would be sort of the framing moment. And then the book would go back to the beginning of 2016. I think “After the Election” announces all the themes of the book. It’s also, I think, one of the strongest poems. And one of the longest, if not the longest. I like that, too: like, look, if this is gonna be a book of long poems, let’s just establish that right from the start. I was getting a lot of good feedback about that poem. Even though it was long, people were reading it and moving quickly through it. So I was like, let’s put this first, and then there will be this moment when the book goes back to the beginning and everyone will have the outcome in their heads and be following along with knowledge that the protagonist of the book does not have.
TT: My next question is connected to what you’ve begun to allude to: the writing process for No Rest. You have a set of poems by your fortieth year, and then the Trump presidency happens, which makes you go back and write new poems. This led you to critically inquire and re-think about what you’ve written before.
Can you describe the process in writing the collection? Are the earlier poems left as artifacts or taken out? And what are some of the things that you considered on the craft level in putting together this collection?
JK: The process was very obsessive, as it always is for me, and it ended up being very long because I started in 2016 and the book wasn’t accepted until 2023. It came out in 2024, so eight years later.
I began with the idea after my third book, More Than Mere Light, that I would write a book of only long poems. This is the kind of book I’d always wanted to write. I began writing poetry in the mid-’90s in college, and pretty early on, I was aware that I was much more into long poems than short poems, both as a reader and a writer. But before Internet publishing was really a thing, it was difficult to get a poem over one page published. Thankfully, a lot has changed in the last 25 years.
In More Than Mere Light, I’d written this very long poem that was over 50 pages, a diary-like letter poem modeled after James Schuyler’s “The Morning of the Poem.” It was kind of a breakthrough for me because it tapped into a subject matter that I wasn’t able to tap into before. I was always trying to include more stuff from my life in my poems, but what was happening was I was only including stuff that I thought made me look good. And in that poem I almost deliberately tried to make myself look bad by including stuff that was very unflattering to share.
But stylistically, the poem felt comfortable. And the response I got to it was unlike any response I’d gotten before. I knew I was connecting with readers on a deeper level. But that kind of poem is obviously super long—you can’t do that all the time. I wanted to write a book that had long poems but would move at a different speed. I think the shortest poem in No Rest is two and a half pages, and the longest is something like 20.
I wanted to use the same form for the whole book. I was drawn to the couplet form because A.R. Ammons, a poet I really like, was writing these book-length poems towards the end of his career using free-verse couplets—a very flexible, fast form. The long poem in More Than Mere Light had very long lines and moved much slower. I wanted to use a shorter, quicker line for the new book, and I felt that couplets would work. So I just started playing around. Beginning in 2016, I started writing the poems by hand. That was the first time I tried doing this. I had this new notebook. I wrote the first poem, then the second poem. And I kept going from there during my winter break from school.
You asked about whether some of the earlier poems are artifacts. In the beginning, I kept everything in there, even the earliest poems, and the original manuscript got quite long. It was almost 200 pages, kind of unheard of for a poetry book, and I knew that. But I also felt like the book was working. It was a finalist for the AWP Prize judged by Claudia Rankine, so I was like, well, if Claudia Rankine likes it! But a few more years passed, and it still wasn’t getting taken.
As time went by and it wasn’t getting published, I asked, How can I fine-tune this? Is there anything I can cut? If you have a 200-page book, you know there’s something you can cut. So in the summer of 2023 I set out to cut about 50 pages. I asked, What are the really strong poems in this book, and what are the interesting poems, but maybe not so necessary.
What I ended up cutting were three or four poems from the first section that were some of the earliest ones I wrote. And then I ended up rearranging some of the poems. Originally, I had “After the Election” first but then there were poems from 2016 that were still unfolding pretty much chronologically how I’d written them. I ended up reordering some of them for more thematic purposes while still keeping these two parallel, overlapping time structures I had in place: one from January to August 2016, and the other from 2016 to 2020. I also decided to date the sections to make the parallel time structures clearer narratively.
TT: I’m going to pick up what you said about not necessarily presenting a perfect speaker and the positive reaction to that truthful version of yourself.
Do you have any tips for writers who are grappling with the ethics of writing about people who are close to them such as their family members, or their friends, or their colleagues? How do you position yourself as an Asian American male poet in thinking through questions of identity and power, etc, which you obviously explore in detail in the collection as well.
JK: It’s a multi-layered question, especially involving Asian American male identity. Maybe I’ll use that as a way into the answer, because I do think it is pretty deeply related. One of the challenges about this particular identity I inhabit is the invisibility I experience.
The thing about being an Asian male is that I felt like I could say almost anything in a poem and nobody would care. Like nobody would even notice. It was almost maddening.
Growing up, I was either made fun of as being gay or just not having any sexuality at all. And then as I got older and tried to announce the fact that I existed sexually by, say, asking somebody out, or losing interest in one person and pursuing another, I was often made to feel like some kind of deviant or monster. There was no in-between of just “human” sexuality.
I think of poems by Li-Young Lee that are maybe the first or only poems that come to mind for people when they think of Asian male heterosexuality on the page. They’re very “Asian” in the sense that in one poem he’s brushing his wife’s long black hair, or something like that. They’re “exotic” and nice in the right way.
I’m trying to instantiate my sexual identity on the page in a way that announces I am fully here—in all the ways I am fucked up, not just acceptable. I think my approach has gotten more brash and honest over time as I have continued to feel unseen or unheard despite my brashness and honesty. It’s almost like I’m testing myself, like Let’s see if I finally exist if I say this.
I was talking to David Mura at a recent AWP about how Asian male sexuality is portrayed. I don’t know how much of his work you’ve read, and I only started reading it a few years ago. I was drawn to how frank he was in his prose, about things like being unfaithful, or watching porn, having a porn addiction—I think he even has a small book that’s out of print about porn addiction. Most poets don’t go anywhere near this stuff. I was like, Whoa this dude was really trailblazing when it comes to writing about Asian American male sexuality in a truthful, fully realistic way—not shying away from the shameful parts of an experience that for most Asian American males is, primarily, shameful.
Somebody asked me at this Books Are Magic event at the start of my book tour for No Rest, “Who encouraged you to write long poems in this way?” My answer was that nobody did. I had always been interested in these very long poems that had traditionally been written by white males, so I guess you could say those encouraged me. But I had never read a poem like that by my kind of identity. There are not many long poems by people of color in general. I had to give myself permission to do this—to take up this much space.
How do you share a daily life such as mine? Where you’re not only presenting what you think is your best self? Because the literature that I really connect to travels far from that sense of a best self. I think this is true for most readers. Maybe you’re reading a poem about someone’s sex life, or they’re masturbating or something—when it’s on the page you’ll just accept it. You’re not thinking about how shameful it is or judging it, like Oh, I can’t believe they just shared that about themselves or someone else. It’s just literature on the page. But then, when you go to write about something shameful from your own life, you can often have this fear or filter.
Over the course of writing my third and fourth books I realized how much I had been filtering myself, and how much of that was because of an internalized racism, not wanting to present myself in a certain way, still presenting myself as a kind of model minority even though from the very beginning I was trying to push against that notion by doing things like swearing in poems, which not many people do, and especially not Asian poets.
TT: In thinking about the poems in No Rest as a record of daily living and contemplating topics like going up for promotion or getting recognition on book lists, how did the revision process work for you?
JK: Revision for me probably works a little differently than it does for most people in that—especially with these longer poems—even in the original composition of the drafts I am revising.
I’ve always been interested in Hemingway’s process. He would work in the morning, and he would write for a period of hours and get to a place where he felt like he could continue and then stop. Then he would do whatever he did for the rest of the day, drinking or boxing or swimming or whatever, but he wouldn’t look at what he had written, and that was key.
I also liked to work in the morning, but my problem was I would write something and then immediately obsess over it. So I was like, Oh, I should try that, I’ll work and then I won’t look at it. What Hemingway would do the next morning is reread what he had written and revise as he went until he got back to that place where he felt like he could continue, and then from there he would just go, writing new stuff, until he stopped again at a place where he felt he could continue. And then he would do this again the next day. So, as he was going, he was constantly revising the older stuff with fresh eyes because he hadn’t looked at it.
I’ve been doing that basically my whole career now. And with this new book, as I mentioned, I started writing poems by hand for the first time. You wouldn’t think long poems would be the kind of poems you would write by hand. But I started doing that because I was determined to try to get into even more raw material with this book, and in a way that I wasn’t controlling it at all. I’d work on the poems a little bit each day. And then the next day I would go back and cross stuff out, add stuff, revising what I’d written the day before, and I would continue until I got to a place where I felt like the draft of the poem was largely done.
I don’t remember when I started typing the poems up. I think I waited until I’d written four or five of them. I felt like, Okay, these are starting to turn into something. What was fun when I eventually started typing them up was that I started to see the lines on the page. When you’re writing by hand, the lines seem longer than they are, even when you have really small handwriting like I do, and suddenly on the white space of a laptop screen they seem a lot shorter. Something about this transfer process enabled me to make lightning-quick revisions as I typed. So there was, first, the process of writing each poem by hand, and as I was writing the “first” draft I would revise as I went, so that draft really consisted of many drafts. And then when I went to type the poem up, there was another revision that happened—not just a revision, but a line making. I was often shifting words around, changing line breaks, tightening things up, and that was very rapid.
I had a first version of the book manuscript by early 2017—after I wrote “After the Election.” The manuscript was already well over 100 pages. It was long, but I had a structure. I started going back and rereading and obsessing over every poem—at this point in the process, it’s potentially endless tinkering for me. I’m trying to tighten, tighten, tighten, especially with a manuscript that I know is long. But then more time passed, and I started adding poems—two of the longer poems in the book, “No Rest” and “The Rest Is Silence.” And after the Covid outbreak I added “Everything We Look Upon Is Blessed.” So on the one hand, I’m tightening poems, but on the other hand, I’m making the book longer.
By the summer of 2023, I was kind of desperate to get the book out. It had been seven years since I started it and six since I finished the first draft. Even after all my tightening, the book was almost 200 pages long, and, as I mentioned before, I decided to cut about 40 to 50 pages. I sent it to a few friends to get their feedback; until that point I hadn’t shared it with anyone, probably because it was so long. I think I was embarrassed—I didn’t want to burden anyone. But they gave me great feedback. Somewhat surprisingly, none of them said they thought the book was way too long. But I ended up cutting 50 pages anyway. Ironically, the long version of the book won the Diode book contest, which I’d submitted in the spring of that year. But I don’t think they minded when I told them I had a shorter version!
Tiffany Troy: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
JK: I hope you liked my new book. Thank you for reading.
What’s been pleasing for me to hear back from the people who have read the book so far is that they have read it all—it’s not a typical poetry book! Most poetry books, they’re like 70 to 80 pages, you can usually read them in a day or two. You can read them between things, on the subway.
This book is more of a commitment. But I’ve heard from people who have read it in a day or even a single sitting, and that’s been encouraging. That was one of the formal challenges of the book: how to write this book of long poems, but not just to be long, or to take up a lot of space. How to write long poems that didn’t seem long, that seemed like they were moving really fast, so that you weren’t even quite aware of how long they were. Like you knew you weren’t reading sonnets, but they didn’t have the feeling of being really burdensome, or like a bore. If you’ve read enough poetry, you’ve read poems that seem long even though they’re just a couple of pages. You’re like, Oh, God, when is this gonna end?
I discovered pretty early on in reading from this book at events, even before it was published, that even the super long ones that took twenty minutes to read didn’t feel that long to people. The main feedback I got was “I didn’t even notice it was that long.” That response kept me believing in the book when it would’ve been easy to give up on it, especially after six years of rejections. I realized people are much more receptive to long poems than we think they are—we often just assume we’re going to bore the shit out of everyone if we read a poem longer than five minutes. I’ve talked to poets who say they never read the long poems in their books, even though those, to me, are the most interesting ones. I guess the hidden benefit of having to read from a book like No Rest at events is you can’t chicken out and read only short poems because you’re worried about boring your audience—there are only long ones!
There’s so much great literature out there that is beyond the frame of a very short attention span. I think you’re missing out if you’re not giving this stuff a chance. Forget about my book—it’s not even 200 pages. Try an 800-page book. Or try, like, Proust. My favorite writer. You’d be surprised. His novel is really long, but it’s not boring. If you commit to it, you’ll be engrossed sentence by sentence. It might not seem like it, but he was actively trying to be as concise as possible—up until he died he was obsessively revising and editing that book. And if you read him, it doesn’t seem like he’s wasting a word. It seems like he’s following this incredibly expansive mind on this incredible voyage through all these sentences, and that to me is magical. That’s my favorite kind of literature. I would much rather read that kind of stuff than a sonnet I find really boring. I would rather be enraptured by the journey of the mind of the writer.