“This was my desk. Below the window is a children’s playground.”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve contributed to our pages. Yongyu Chen’s “Outpost” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 252.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

I started this poem in late September in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I came back from a long trip in Asia and was waking early because of the time difference. I felt good! I was writing a lot.

I wrote the first draft after a sequence of experiences that felt like experiences already while I was inside them—starting with meeting, for the first time, a friend’s close friend and ending with a walk home on a gray day, after rain, looking at the oak branches on the ground.

It felt like the feeling of wanting to pick up the oak pieces—and noticing it, then making myself do so—did something to the previous experiences. When I came home, I started writing the poem.

How about the second draft? The third? How many drafts were there, and what were the primary differences between them?

There was one continually evolving draft, which became shorter. Over two months, I also started new poems, and a few layered into this one.

I went to a claire rousay concert—it reminded me of an Ichiko Aoba concert I didn’t go to. The title of one of Aoba’s songs, “Imperial Smoke Town,” became a scene with an ironsmith and feathers and an outpost …

I saw my friend, and we sat on the stairs—there were no seats in the café. People walked between us, up and down. We read a poem by Celan together …

Hölderlin was the last, sudden addition to the poem. I was learning about his walk through the mountains and the gun under his pillow in the cold …

While editing, the word free became important. I was writing a lot, and freedom was what writing felt like to me. I was reading Alice Notley, which freed me to write about more things I notice. I thought that there was something photographic about this loosening, which to me meant writing a lot, just writing what happens, and knowing a lot of it won’t work and that what works will work not because of technique, mainly, but through the assemblage of real things indexed in the poem.

The photographer Moyra Davey once wrote that “accident is the lifeblood of photography.” And “My ratio these days is perhaps one usable frame for every five or ten rolls of film.” In the same text, she quotes Garry Winogrand—“That’s really what photography—still photography—is about. In the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished, after all?

When I put Hölderlin in, the poem felt finished because doing so felt … like it broke a rule, or inner pattern. He is so historical, graspably real and concrete. That texture finished the poem for me.

The last set of edits were done with the Paris Review poetry editor Chicu Reddy’s suggestions, which tightened the poem. Some of these edits changed or reversed meanings—“No longer remembering” became “Remembering.” Others removed objects which I couldn’t imagine removing, like the hand at the end, on the thigh. I admired those edits because I couldn’t have made them, from within the logic of making the poem. They work on the poem and let its meaning change, if necessary. Or maybe the meaning itself needed to be developed for the poem to work, better. These edits were easy to accept because they were sharp, difficult, and not me.

Are there hard and easy poems?

Yes. This one was easy.

Yongyu Chen’s first book of poems, a winner of the 2023 Nightboat Poetry Prize, is forthcoming from Nightboat in spring 2026.