Just One Thing with Simon Shieh

The author with his dog, Momo

Simon Shieh’s April issue poem “Unforgiven” builds an unnerving sense of dread from the very first line. Here he shares just one thing about the piece:

“‘Unforgiven’ started out as an experiment with the space of the A4 page—inspired largely by certain poems in Jenny Xie’s ‘Eye Level’—originally without the True or False section in the middle. That space articulated a void that I found productive for the poem, but ultimately, I felt like the poem had more to say. I spent months trying to fill that space in a way that felt justified, but nothing I wrote seemed to justify obfuscating that silence. Then one day, sitting in my office, the language that would become the first three lines of that section came to me suddenly. After that, I understood that the language of that section needed to unfold in a series of gestures, each of which exists in its own world of negativity and silence. I realized then that this poem is about, among other things, narrative itself—the impulse that gives rise to it, the truth it conceals, and the way it shapes identity.”