Featured Interview with Poetry Contest Winner: Fiona Jin

"It’s hard to feel like you’re moving if everything around you is also collapsing, like a pile of Monopoly money falling from the Mahjong table."

—Fiona Jin, "Maclaurin Series"

We're so excited to present our featured interview with the winner of Sophon Lit's inaugural poetry contest: Fiona Jin! The raw, visceral imagery of her poem "Maclaurin Series," as well as its bold experimentation with mathematical concepts, made Jin's piece stand out as an innovative paragon of what poetry can be. In this interview, Jin explores the intentions and process behind her writing, the intersections of STEM and the humanities, and her specific inspirations behind "Maclaurin Series" in particular. We hope you enjoy! You can find Jin's winning poem here.

Why do you write?

I think I write for a lot of reasons, some similar, some very divergent. But here’s one I’ve been thinking about recently: Writing is one of the most unconditional forms of thinking and expression. If you write a poem, nobody can tell you that you’re “wrong”—they can say that they don’t agree with the message, or that a particular technique didn’t come off as you intended, but ultimately, writing makes you confront the fact that each individual’s reality is different. As such, I think writing has such a capacity for exploring the full extent of the human condition. I like that the power of writing comes from its capacity for empathy.

How would you characterize your poetic style?

The first word that comes to mind is “precise.” The second word that comes to mind is “unavoidant.” I want to make every line have an immediate impact while still being complex enough to hold more meaning on the second or third read.

What is your writing and revision process like, and how do you know when a poem is finished?

To put it colloquially, I write against the phrase “it’s not that deep.” When drafting and revising, I challenge myself to interpret feelings or ideas that might otherwise be oversimplified—to resist falling back on the “easy” but not necessarily most incisive way to end a particular image, line, or stanza. I don’t want to “make sense” as much as I want to get to the bottom of something. Because ultimately, it is that deep—writing about something necessitates a sense of care, which I think is something that’s more important than ever as caring is being seen as “embarassing,” “immature,” or “uncool.”

Also, I don’t think a poem is ever really “finished!” I’ve written poems that sit in my Google Drive as they are for months before I spontaneously change them when I get an idea for further development.

Where do you typically draw inspiration from, and what inspired you to write “Maclaurin Series”? 

If the graph of a function’s Maclaurin series is identical to that of the function, are they essentially the same? Mathematically, of course not. But in real life, you don’t get a sheet of neatly-typed equations explaining how two things that from the origin to the ends of the axes look the same actually produce those (x,y) pairs entirely differently. I was inspired to write this poem after thinking about what it meant for a series to mimic another equation and yet essentially was perpetually unraveling from the inside: The terms in the Maclaurin series of f(x)=sin(x), for example, have factorial denominators getting infinitely smaller. In general, I’m often inspired by seemingly small or niche ideas or images that expand way beyond what I originally expected.

You use mathematical concepts in such an ingenious way in this poem. How do you see the interdisciplinary intersection of STEM with humanities in your writing?

Math and writing are both sets of ways to comprehend the world. I’m fascinated by the concept that we can define an idea, once its conditions and circumstances have been established, to be true forever, even though the average human perceives so little of, and probably doesn’t fully comprehend the implications of, “forever:” For example, for a function with an infinite domain, the graph would just keep going. Nevermind that people can never actually reach the end of forever to see for themselves, but we deduce from what we know that it’s true anyways. We define reality from our systems of logic and reasoning, and it doesn’t matter whether those definitions are actually “fact” as much as they are, to us, provably “true.” 

Writing, to me, is doing the same thing; putting something into coherent sentences is an inherent act of comprehension. At the basis of my relationship with writing is my belief that there isn’t an overarching, universal meaning or characteristic of life and the human condition, but that for each individual person, their lived experience feels like the whole world. Those beliefs, feelings, and perspectives, rather than “objective” fact, is what shapes both our collective reality (through our consequent actions) and our perceived reality. I keep thinking about the last line in “Maclaurin Series:” “I will keep having and halving until mouths flatten into perfect little flowers, molars necessarily pummeled into the whole world’s dirt.” 

I think ultimately STEM and writing are fascinating and inextricable because they are both fundamentally brave attempts made by humanity to give meaning to the universe.

What is your favorite image/moment in this poem and why?

I’d have to say the egg-lice image. “Maclaurin Series,” to me, encapsulates the feeling of looking at something for so long that it starts to make less and less sense. If you think about it, everything will eventually rot and be consumed by things we try not to think about, that we try to clean away for our entire lives. The egg-lice image reflects that, I think.

What emotions and thoughts do you wish to evoke in readers’ minds?

I want readers to feel almost like they’re staring directly at the sun.

Anything else you would like to add? 

Thank you so much for this amazing opportunity! I love the work that Sophon Lit does for the writing community.