We met with Chanlee Luu in November to discuss the publication of her debut collection of poetry, The Machine Autocorrects Code to “I”, which came out from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House in October. The collection was the winner of the 2024 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, which aims to support racially and culturally diverse poetry from writers based in Virginia or Maryland.
Luu graduated from Hollins University’s Jackson Center of Creative Writing with an MFA in poetry in 2023. She currently works as the Green Navigator and Administrative Assistant at the Wyndham Robertson Library at Hollins. The poetry in her debut collection, which Luu started writing in 2016, is an expansive survey of her life, and Luu places her experiences and memories in a reflective discourse of family heritage, homelands, otherness, sexuality, and education. The collection attenuates itself across a variety of cultural, ecological, and political considerations and seems to be Luu’s personal attempt to showcase the realities of contemporary life. For these reasons, Luu’s work toes the line between the personal and the communal with a distinctly self-centering poetic voice that seems to be interested in and “about” everything, all at once.
Luu grew up in Martinsville, Virginia, in a Vietnamese household. Her parents immigrated from Vietnam and found work in the textile manufacturing industry in Virginia, where Luu has spent her whole life. Though English was their second language, Luu says that her parents often read stories in English to her and her sister despite the language barrier. They also watched American television shows together, and Luu multicultural upbringing as a child of immigrants is apparent in the range of her poetry. In poems like “Ready For It,” Luu writes from her ancestral imagination and includes characters in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean for the word “preparation”. At the same time, there are plenty of poems in Luu’s collection that are influenced by American pop culture. In fact, Luu says that the structure of her collection was inspired by her love for Taylor Swift’s album Folklore. Taking a closer look at the three opening poems, Luu showed us how they were meant to serve as preambles to the three marked sections in her collection. The title of Luu’s collection, The Machine Autocorrects Code to “I”, is taken from a line in her poem “Taylor’s Platinum Mop (Ode to Bleachella),” which is about Taylor Swift’s blonde-haired era in 2016.
After graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in Chemical Engineering in 2017, Luu spent what she calls her “Dickinson years” reading Ocean Vuong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Cathy Park Hong—writers from the Asian-American diaspora—as well as Ada Limón and authors of queer YA fiction. Luu says that her first encounters with Vietnamese writers in college made her realize that she wanted to be a poet, too.
Sitting with us during a break from her workday, Luu spoke with us about her pivot from Chemical Engineering to poetry in college, her experience with writing and publishing her first collection of poetry, the social and political stakes of her writing, and her hopes for the future.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for grammar and clarity.
What was the transition from engineering to poetry like for you?
I don’t think there was conflict. Because I think when I started doing spoken word poetry in college, it was this place I could de-stress and be myself outside the collaborative world of engineering. People are always asking about this transition between two seemingly very different things, but I guess I see them as kind of similar processes in terms of distilling information. You simplify an equation, you simplify a poem, and they both involve an observation of the world around you. I think capitalism kind of pushes them apart when obviously they used to be closer, like during the Renaissance.
Following that, do you find the creation of poetry to be scientific?
I won’t say they’re the exact same process, but I guess I do shape and structure my poems in a more formal, concrete way, in terms of sometimes using Excel spreadsheets to map out rhymes and syllables. The one I’m really thinking about from my collection is “Justice for the Form(ula): A Xia Sestina,” because a sestina is really structured in that you need to repeat the end rhymes, so I had to map it out on an Excel spreadsheet.
Did you form this collection with the intention of making an overtly political and social statement?
I think so. I guess I think a lot about Asian Americans in general. We’re really in this weird social status in terms of higher education and privilege and earning power. At the same time, we’re seen as other by white people and white supremacy. How do we organize Asian Americans to divest in capitalism and form collective groups?
Do you feel like your collection provides answers for those questions?
I don’t know. It was hard not getting feedback from Asian Americans on this collection. I felt like I wanted somebody to talk through these ideas with in the lens of Asian American identity in the U.S., and I didn’t really have that.
Did you write the collection mostly for yourself?
I think so. I think that the conversation among poets is always like, “You wrote this for yourself, but did you really because you’re still crafting it to be read by someone else.” But I did feel like I wrote this for myself. A lot of contemporary poetry is the “I,” especially in diasporic poetry. I had a good discussion about this with Anthony Le, who’s a queer Vietnamese artist from D.C. He did the painting for the cover of my collection. We talked about wanting to create art for the collective while also contending with the spotlight being on you, the artist as an individual. It’s an interesting dynamic.
How did your family respond to the news of the publication?
My parents didn’t really know what an MFA was when I told them I was doing it. My mom’s been surprisingly proud, though she doesn’t say it. When my collection came out, she was showing it to her coworkers and thought I would be selling it like my fundraisers in high school, thinking that I’d be going to people and handing it out.
What do you look forward to in the future now that you’re collection is out?
I’m hoping that the publication of my collection will help me attend a writing residency so that I’ll have time to write. I’m working on an essay collection that I started in Anne Boyer’s class. She was the Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence in 2023. The essay collection is about all the things that are in my poetry collection. I write about political history, Asian American history, family history. Essays allow my writing to be more expansive, but they’re still hybrid in terms of these really short, fragmented sentences that I discovered in Lily Hoang’s, A Bestiary, which I read because Jessie Van Eerden recommended it.
Luu is slated to read from her collection throughout the winter and spring. The following are dates for her upcoming readings:
Sunday, December 15, 2024 @ the Taubman Museum of Art
Thursday, January 16, 2025 for DC Commission of the Arts/ Vagabond/Hope & Ha-ha’s (location TBD)
March 26-29, 2025 @ AWP Conference (location TBD)
April 5, 2025 @ Hollins University’s 63rd Annual Lex Allen Literary Festival
Written by Alice Dai (MFA ’26).
Hollins MFA 