Margaret Rhee Interviews Stine An at Jacket2

As part of her "Automated Poetics" series at Jacket2, Margaret Rhee spends times with poet and comedian Stine An. "Through taking up the question of the politics of play," Rhee explains in her introduction, "I’m interested in exploring how playing across genres, mediums, forms, disciplines, and departments, etc. makes for new kinds of innovative art, thinking, community, and specifically poetry." From there: 

In doing so, the hybridity of practices better intervenes and gestures toward transformative futures. The current conspiracy-us versus them- culture perhaps exemplifies the problem of singular thinking and the need for creative, eclectic, and innovative practices more than ever. I’ve long been moved by poets with practices that cross over boundaries and intervene in dichotomous logics. With attention to justice, the series also explores how multiple forms of art practice prompt us to reimagine a different kind of world, as strategy and survival and playfully ask how play lends itself to more libratory ways of creation and practice. 

Poet-comedians like Stine An embodies this expansive and playful practice. Her poetry explores Korean diaspora, and questions of longing, food politics, and home. Through playful, poignant, and experimentation with form, Stine’s poems such as “KFC, or the taste of success is — wait for it — tender on the outside, tough on the inside,” and “Real Imitation Crab Meat” offer how playfulness in poetry and food politics creates new avenues of the poetics of the diaspora. You can read both poems at a recent issue of Electric Literature. 

In addition to being a poet and MFA candidate, Stine is a stand-up comedian. Her innovative comedy plays with contemporary musings of dating, dress, aesthetics, and relationships. In a performance at the Comedy Club in Cambridge, Stine is dressed in a vintage tourquiose and blue flowered printed button up shirt, baggy lavender pants, and funky pale pink glasses. Her jokes, “I like my men like my public restrooms,” “Everyone remembers the class clown, but who remembers the class juggler?” are delivered with care, deadpan, and measured seriousness and with gestures that demonstrate a performative control that seems comfortable, as if we were talking at a party we met, near the corner, where the drinks are in the bathtub. In yearbooks, she says to the adage don’t ever change, “I think we should be writing, please change. A lot.” References to John Cage’s 4’33, Stine’s comedy speaks to an educated and artistic audience, and dismantles racial and gendered stereotypes through measured, humorous, intelligent comedy, and embodied performance of the everyday: www.jokestine.com. 

In the spirit of the interview as a feminist consciousness-raising practice, and of knowledge production and exchange, I’m pleased to interview Stine on her poetry and comedy. Please see below for the first part of an interview on her experience of becoming a poet and comedian and her poem “B-Dragon Acquires Kafka’s Axe and Wonders …”

Read their complete discussion at Jacket2.