I’m thrilled to kick off a new conversations with writers series with my good friend, Cameron Quan Louie.
Cameron Quan Louie is a Tucson-based poet who I got to know at the University of Washington, where we were both studying for our MFAs. Cameron is a true lover of literature—witty and full of knowledge—so it’s no wonder he’s kept up a regular publishing cadence since our studies. Cameron was recently included in the Best New American Poets anthology, won a 2019 grant from the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona for a photo/poem project, and won the 2017 McLeod-Grobe prize for poetry.
Apology Engine is Cameron’s first chapbook, and the subject of our interview. This compelling series of prose poems, which asks the central question: “Who apologizes to whom?”, won the 2020 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook competition. It was published this past spring.
I greatly enjoyed this collection and have been eager to sit down with Cameron to talk a bit about the process of writing it.
Poetry writing seems like such a mystic, ethereal process to me. How did Apology Engine come together?
There wasn’t really a thesis when I started writing these poems. I had the idea that I wanted to explore apologies, but I wasn’t sure how. So, I took a cue from the cubists—to blow up apologies and look at them from every angle.
I rarely sat down and wrote one poem on its own…the connection to cubism always had me writing and revising three or four at a time, stealing a line from one to start another, looking to hold the fragmentation from collapsing the entire project while simultaneously resisting any kind of movement towards some ultimate coherence. As I worked, I began discovering leitmotifs like the squid, the engine, the vortex and the box. Refrains and choruses! Stein’s “Tender Buttons” and Lyn Hejinian’s “My Life” were on my mind. Really, I took more of a lyric essay approach, where you just riff and riff on a single subject until you run out of fuel.
How long did it take you to put together Apology Engine?
I think the first of these poems were finished around 2017, around the time we finished the MFA. I submitted the full chap in 2019 and won the Gold Line prize in 2020. Due to the pandemic there was a slight delay in the editing process, so the collection was finally published in 2022. That’s a long time for not a lot of pages!
But you’re also teaching, yes? That takes up time.
I teach 5 periods of high school English.
Are you getting time to write while you’re teaching?
Not a ton, but I’m trying to find time during the weekend to do a push. I also have the summer free, which is when I did a really big push this year. That’s how I built Apology Engine into a 70-page manuscript. Version 2.0 is called All Apologies, taken from the poem where I talk about Kurt Cobain and his song of the same name. It’s out for submission.
So, you weren’t done exploring apologies? I’m interested in this slow build.
There were a few dimensions of apology I didn’t feel were tapped fully in the chapbook. For example, while it was covered a bit in the chap, the socio-cultural dimensions of apology take much more space in the full manuscript. One of my favorite examples of this is the Pope’s recent apology tour in Canada. So, I spent some time looking up other famous cultural apologies.
What were you surprised by when creating all the new material?
The second part of this book came quite quickly compared to the chapbook. I wrote triple the amount of material in the course of a summer than I had in the years before. I think this is a great example of Adam Grant’s concept of “plan slow and execute quickly”.
Is the new manuscript organized in any specific way?
It’s broken into three sections. The first section is Apology Engine as a whole. Section two is apology and religion. I was really interested in the etymology of apology, and the Greek apologia, which was taken up by the Christians and Catholics as a defense of faith—that was a dimension I hadn’t explored at all before. I was able to go into the semiotics as well, and into the micro aspects of my personal connections and relationship to apology and religion, which is perhaps the snarkiest aspect of it all. I’m an atheist, and I’m pretty cynical of organized religion, so I couldn’t really help myself there. And the last piece is the cultural aspect of apology.
Were those categories there when you started writing the chapbook?
No, it was pretty organic. Again, it was all about the riffing and burning out, starting a new riff. I think that’s why I ended up working with prose—it really allows you to circle around an idea until you run out of steam. It also creates a sense of connectedness—because the poems aren’t named, you get the sense you’re reading one long poem. I didn’t feel stanzas or poetic line would have served the project.
Did you put any constraints on these prose poems?
As far as form I didn’t put a limit on lines or length, except that I wanted to limit myself to a page or less. I didn’t really want it to begin feeling like prose. I also was working with the idea of a circle around which, or a box within which, an idea that comes from Rosmarie Waldrop. Really, the one restraint I guess I was working with was visual—that all the poems should look box-ish.
You wrote about humor in poetry for your MFA thesis—a project I think about often. So naturally, I’m wondering what you see the function of humor being within this collection, because so many of these poems feel funny to me in a way.
When you’re dealing with difficult subjects, you have to understand that at some point, things are no longer pleasant for the reader. I’m punishing myself! I’m punishing other people! Am I just spreading misery for my own entertainment? So, I had humor in mind while tackling the subjects in the chap.
I think a lot of the comedy in Apology Engine comes from the images being kind of awkward, and silly. I don’t really like poems that keep the images really precious, or pretty.
To that point, I love the one image in the chap, where the bloody birth of a cow is juxtaposed with the cat/cow movement of yoga …
Less a punchline and more the strange incongruity there. That gallows humor helps me, at least, as a writer, to keep writing through difficult subjects. I actually think too that there’s a lot of humor already there within apologies. Humor allows writers to show a little self awareness.
Speaking of which, since the subject matter is all about apology, something which is innately personal, did you stick with the “I” or did you use a character?
Apology Engine starts off in first person, without a lot of separation between the speaker and the author. I am the “I” of those poems. However, as it progresses—well, it runs out of fuel I guess. You run out of apologies for yourself. There was a part of me that felt tired of listening to my own apologies. It’s tedious to always be going through this masochistic apology process. So I end up taking on these personas. I do one from my wife’s perspective, one from my mom’s perspective. But that also creates a different tension for the book, too. People are rightfully waiting for the big confession. You’re writing about apologies, so tell us! What’s the big climactic admission? But the project is less about building to one big confession than exploring the way that to be human is to be implicated in all kinds of badness, all kinds of guilt and shortcoming. One apology reminds you of another and another, and the process could really go on forever—a machine with perpetual inertia. Then, with the personas there, it never comes.
That’s also kind of funny in a way. Do you feel honesty also plays a role in your work?
We have a sense of responsibility here, and this is something I’m really concerned with. I hear women, queer folks, people of color, all these people in my word that I care about—they’re asking for the dominant culture (and I think I fit into that and experience a lot of privilege thanks to certain aspects of my identity, particularly gender) to own the things that are happening in the world and to talk about it. Being honest and doing that led me to a place where I realized that there was no amount of apologizing I could do that would atone for anything. In fact, the more you do it, it becomes a self-indulgent exercise. But in many cases, we still need to make the apology, it’s still necessary. This is the paradox that powers the engine.
And it becomes dishonest too.
Yes, there’s a tension between that very wholesome motive when starting out and how it can become corrupted as you continue with it. That’s something that the bigger project of All Apologies talks and ruminates about. As I work further I hope that becomes clearer.
Buy Apology Engine on the Gold Line Press website. If you read it, please drop a few comments in the section below!