"Contributor Notes: A Q&A with Ailing Zhou" by Ezinne Emeh
Contributor Notes is a new series featuring brief interviews with MORIA contributors. Below is an interview with Ailing Zhou, author of Issue Nine’s “Paint Me in the Color of Your Greed” and “The Ballad of Modern-day Solace-seeking.”
1. What inspired these poem titles?
“Paint Me with the Color of Your Greed”:
It started with this idea that perception can never be fresh. Even in the face of something new it arrives already coloured and adulterated by histories and beliefs and biases. It distorts the subject of perception into a version of itself, however slightly and however much the perceiver denies it so. “Paint” is a euphemistic reference to this notion that perception taints, inevitably—it cannot be helped. “Paint Me,” though sounding like an invitation, in fact challenges the perceiver to confront their anamorphic tendencies, which in this case is fuelled by their “greed.” I isolate greed as the wellspring here because this is a poem about oppression and greed is one of the more fundamental things that motivates it. Greed has always interested me because of the way people consistently try to distance themselves from it, as if it’s not part of them but a thing of itself alive with its own agency.
“The Ballad of Modern-day Solace-seeking”:
I conceptualized the poem as a song and its lines as lyrics, hence “Ballad.” “Solace-seeking” refers to the perennial human desire for understanding and intimacy with others, which persists even when the individual has become the primary focus of society today.
2. What lesson or understanding were you hoping to leave your readers with?
“Paint”:
This is a poem about the colonial gaze and how it perceives. Its guile and ubiquity, its invasiveness. The cruelty of its self-denial. How it degrades through romanticization. Although “I” am the subject of the gaze, the awareness that “I” demonstrate of this fact precisely undermines the imbalance of power within the dynamic. The poem is a subversion—I hope readers can recognize that.
“Ballad”:
“Ballad” is full of juxtapositions: the speaker takes on a coaxing tone just to plead detachment. “I” empathize with the pain of others yet refuse to be concerned. Though every word is spoken earnestly they only end up putting the reader at a further distance. There are no lessons here but I did want to leave readers with questions: what are the limits of intimacy? What are its reasonable demands? How do we avoid succumbing to apathy in an increasingly indifferent world?
3. How would you describe the state of mind you were in when writing this poem?
“Paint”:
I’ve gone through some significant personal changes in the last few years and experienced a lot of grief in the process. I waited to write this poem until the emotions had subsided enough for me to create and hold space in my writing—I wanted it to be more than just an iteration of suffering or anger. When I got to that point I was able to afford much more rigor with my words.
“Ballad”:
I’ve been interested for a while now in the idea that people have started to become more and more indifferent to each other. There’s lots of research on what’s causing this—phones, social media, news fatigue, worsening mental health—and they all point to a pattern of collective dissociation from reality. But in spite of this, people don’t stop seeking connections with others because it’s an intuitive thing to do. I reflected a lot on my own personal relationships as I wrote this poem; it felt cathartic to create from these thoughts, but also a little frustrating that I could only ask questions and not answer them.
4. Was there a reason you chose the structure or line count of the poem? Is there a reason it was not prose or a story?
“Paint”:
I write poetry rather intuitively and much prefer free verse over formal verse. The line breaks usually depend on how the lyric sounds, which in turn determine how long the poem becomes. I’ll also test different visualizations of the words before I settle on one version. With this particular poem, I wanted the last three lines to stand alone because they offer a completely different image to the previous verse and momentarily pull away from the personal. I wanted to really deliver on that feeling of alienation. As for why it’s not prose, I generally find that poetry is better for honing in on a specific moment or feeling, it’s more impactful.
“Ballad”:
The traditional definition of a ballad does characterize it as narrative verse set to music, but what I had in mind when I configured the poem as a ballad leaned more towards the genre of songs we classify as ballads now: heartfelt, sang intimately, usually played to a slower rhythm. These qualities, and the feeling of warmth, of tenderness that ballads have gave an interesting contrast to the content of the poem and I hoped that this could add layers to the questions of intimacy that the poem raises.
5. What draws you to poetry over other genres of writing? What formal elements of poetry are most compelling to you?
I’m a relatively new poetry writer; my usual medium is actually prose. But I have been more and more drawn to poetry because there is more room for experimentation and less pressure on logical cohesion. My favourite poetic devices are sound devices: alliteration, sibilance, onomatopoeia, and so forth.
6. How do you strike a balance between mystery and clarity in your work, especially when considering how you want readers to connect to the piece?
Mystery is never a goal. When I write I consider foremost how I can most accurately convey what I’m thinking about, and sometimes that can be difficult to articulate. If that’s the case, I will revise my writing until I feel that the expressions are clear, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the meaning of the work will be plain to the reader, and it may still require analysis on their part. But I think this is less of a writing dilemma than it is the larger issue that we’re not always able to communicate exactly how we feel. I’m still, and will probably always be, working on this.
EZINNE EMEH
Ezinne Emeh is the program manager for Issue Nine. She is currently majoring in architecture, but enjoys reading and writing on the side. She always finds it exciting to experience different approaches to life through creative writing.