New Faculty Interview: Cindy Juyoung Ok Joins the English Department

Cindy Juyoung Ok is the author of Ward Toward from the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the translator of The Hell of That Star by Kim Hyesoon, forthcoming with Wesleyan University Press. A former physics teacher at a large public school, she also taught creative writing as a lecturer or writer-in-residence at UC San Diego, Wellesley College, and Kenyon College. Ok will teach both graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops this year.

Welcome to Davis! What are you most looking forward to as you begin your time here in the MFA Creative Writing program?

The students and their work in poetry and beyond. 

What’s something about your teaching approach you’d like current and prospective students to know? What do you hope they take away from your classes?

I find the fact that I’m a writer myself mostly irrelevant to teaching (the roles of reviewer, editor, or interviewer sometimes more connected). 

You recently published Ward Toward, so huge congratulations are in order. Was there anything that surprised you about the publication journey? Are there any poets or literary movements that have particularly influenced your work or shaped your perspective as a poet and educator?

I believed myself to be an easygoing person until my publication process, which made obvious I am drawn to performatively neurotic and jokingly unreasonable friends who label me relaxed and reasonable in social relativity; I was bothered and affected by so many small logistical pieces, though of course it was a longheld and happy dream to join a series that I started reading as a teen. 

How do you think the role of poetry is evolving in today’s literary and cultural landscape? What excites you most about the future of the art form?

Many writers have and had degrees and rights withheld by institutions demanding "reflection papers” or “apology essays" about their desperately loving actions protesting genocide against Palestinians and Palestine. The assignment indicates the use poets can have to propaganda machines, how the naming and remembering we hope threatens the institution or the state may instead legitimize it. But encouraging is the writers who refuse such so-called reflection, whose writing and living refracts. 

Regarding your work, Rae Armantrout said your "impulse is to shake things up.” Do you have any advice for poets on how to do this in their own work in a meaningful way?

Hopefully every poem is a tremble. Earnestness aids newness because to try can risk embarrassment. Most students take an interest or skill they have and “follow the money” a bit—researching origins, reading poets known for particular content or form. Making time to do a sort of contrapositive, to read more wildly and indiscriminately and fiddle with unconnected threads to new seams, can also change and challenge.