Bad Bitch Energy Meets Big Ideas: Adrienne Chung Talks Poetry with Zack Lesmeister

Adrienne Chung is the author of Organs of Little Importance (Penguin, 2023) and a winner of the National Poetry Series. Her work has been published in The Yale Review, Diagram, The Chicago Review, and elsewhere. A recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Bread Loaf, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, she teaches at Willamette University and the Berlin Writers’ Workshop.

Organs of Little Importance can be purchased here

From Zack Lesmeister: Organs of Little Importance is a collection that traces the fragile boundaries between body, language, and memory as Adrienne Chung guides us through a landscape where the physical and emotional are inseparable. Structured with quiet precision, Chung’s poems carve out spaces where intimacy and identity are constantly redefined, exploring the weight of familial ties, desire, and selfhood in a world that often tries to minimize them. Her language is both tender and surgical, dissecting the body in ways that reveal both its vulnerability and resilience. Chung reimagines the relationship between the corporeal and the abstract, inviting us to question how much of ourselves we are willing to give away, how much remains intact when we do. In this collection, the body becomes not just a vessel but a map, an organ of navigation through complicated emotional terrain. Her poems ask, “What does it mean to be important?” in a world where identity is often compartmentalized and reduced, but Chung’s work insists on the multitudes contained within each organ, each memory, each small and tender moment. Organs of Little Importance vibrates with lyric precision and emotional depth, offering a profound meditation on the intersections of flesh and feeling.

Zack Lesmeister: The book radiates a level of BBE (Bad Bitch Energy) that few achieve, something akin to a Chanel Rouge 160 or a thigh-high Alyx boot. And in person, you always dress to the 10s. Could you describe how fashion, beauty, and/or visual aesthetics influence your poetics and poetic process? 

Adrienne Chung: That’s an interesting question—I actually do see a certain leanness and angularity to the poetry I like and the clothes I wear, qualities that don’t describe my tastes in other mediums, which run toward the almost dialectically opposed. When it comes to music, food, architecture, film, visual art, interiors—everything else, really—I gravitate toward the polyphonic, the lush, the mammalian, the fallible. 

I’m deeply unmoved by the art of material distillates like ikebana or molecular gastronomy, or anything that conflates the sensual world with scientific precision. It bores me, and I’m really not someone who’s easily bored. I once had a tomato consommé at a restaurant whose chef de cuisine was a protege of Thomas Keller. It was served up in a chilled martini glass and contained the brilliance of ten thousand tomatoes in each sip. It was terrific—possibly life-affirming—but I don’t want the concept of a tomato for dinner; I want a tomato. And don’t get me started on minimalist homes. 

As far as process, my writing practice is inherently subtractive, which is unfortunate given my tendency to write too little to begin with. I’d give anything to be the other kind of writer.

ZL: In your book, you have poems informed by multiple disciplines. Mathematics and psychology are just a few. What is the role of research in your writing? 

AC: I’m inspired most by big ideas, by concepts beyond my comprehension. I’m less immediately inspired by the events and elements of the material world, which is probably why my novel still isn’t happening. Very rarely is the germ of a poem a memory or image or something concrete. More often, it’s something like Hume’s work on causation, which inspired the “Problem,” or Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve, which inspired the “Blindness Pattern.” I think this impulse to mediate the experiences of the self with theoretical abstractions is as much a coping mechanism as it is a function of artistic temperament though. It grants me some psychic distance from myself, which is always welcome. Personally, I’m not trying to Be Here Now all the time. Just sometimes.

ZL: I find it rare that poets are engaging with mathematical formulas or mathematical theory. What can writers learn from math, and how do you see it informing the ways you think about writing?

AC: I approach mathematics more from a place of fascination than engagement since I don’t understand anything happening over there. I’m attracted to the idea of theorems and rules and constants: the idea that there exist unchanging values that can be invoked to solve a problem is wild to me. I love the definitiveness of proof and a final answer. I also love the mathematician’s obsession with the torus because I, too, love donuts. 

ZL: In talking about artists, Baldwin states: “the primary distinction is that [they] must actively cultivate that state which most [people], necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone.” And in many of the poems you speak to journeys of loneliness (familial, romantic, etc). How do you traverse loneliness in your poetics? What poetic devices or forms bring you comfort to traverse a plane of solitude?

AC: Writing is an inherently lonely condition. You read alone, write alone, edit alone, and assemble a book alone. Even giving readings to an audience is a lonely experience because it’s just you up there, repeating your life’s saddest stories back to yourself as people look on in silence. While I do think I was built for this line of work—blessed with the constitution for staring at a screen for hours in the dark fixated on the syntax of a singular sentence—I’ve found that practices like meditation and running do help cultivate and refine that state of aloneness to a greater, more generative degree. Aloneness is a muscle. 

ZL: What are you working on now? 

AC: I’m passively working on a second collection. Also passively working on the discipline to put down my phone for four hours, which I’m convinced is the secret to writing a novel. Both are slow going. 

Zack Lesmeister is a queer poet and multidisciplinary artist and the current Poetry Editor for HFR.