To Unfix Our Fixed Ideas

Laura Wetherington interviews Mia You about “Festival.”

By Laura WetheringtonMay 21, 2025

• Poetry

WHEN I TRIED to choose a poem from Mia You’s new poetry book, Festival, to read aloud to a friend, I realized that many of the poems run longer than three pages. Many are prose-like in their structure and lyric essay–like in their movement. “An Epistolary Taxonomy of Holes,” for example, runs 12 pages and is separated into numbered sections, which the notes in the back tell us are a nod to Bernadette Mayer and Vito Acconci’s magazine 0 to 9. Each section begins with a question from Mayer’s sonnets. In the fifth section, which includes questions five, six, and seven, the narrator calls the stanza break at a sonnet’s turn “a hole marked out below writing’s waist,” a description that simultaneously calls up the space between stanzas, anatomical holes, the newspaper’s organizational structure of “below the fold,” and the crease in the book we hold as we read a poem. It’s pointing in all directions at once. I’ve been a superfan of Mia You’s writing since her first book precisely because of this multidirectional, whip-smart map of her mind on the page, and Festival further crystallizes the sharp turns of her previous work through the figure of the hologram. The book plays with questions of reality, labor, culture, and family dynamics through what Festival’s first poem calls “blessed versions.” Each poem is a universe of its own and repeats the larger image of the book; it’s a book of cultural criticism and personal lyric. 

If you haven’t read Mia You’s books, what you need to know is this: her writing is documental, in Michael Leong’s sense of the word, meaning she replicates and quotes documents in her writing. Her first book, I, too, dislike it (2016), includes screenshots of tweets, while Festival cites newspapers, social media, and a host of public and literary figures. Festival is bookended with epigraphs. But it’s also documentary in the sense of a cinematic recording of everyday life, giving the reader the sense that we’re following a less-planned, more-lyric version of a reality show where one tween douses the other with perfume as a form of revenge, or where the author ends a series of lines with commas, mimicking the narrator’s daydream about a book where “the writing would be shaped like spots all over the page.” This is not to say the book is self-focused or entirely autobiographical. It’s not clear what’s auto- and what’s -fiction. This is partially because of all the normal arguments about a poem’s speaker, but also because the book moves outward toward history, inward toward imagination, and relationally toward an imagined parallel set of lives. This is a book full of characters that spins in every direction at once—a centrifugal symptom of our moment—declaring with centripetal clarity that “capital makes all of us female.” 

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LAURA WETHERINGTON: I want to first ask you about the title, Festival. On Belladonna* Collaborative’s website, the book description calls up the notion of a festival being communal and celebratory while simultaneously ritualizing consumption and violence. Reading your book, I kept thinking of what I knew of Dutch culture before I moved there (nothing, really) and how my understanding of both Dutch and US culture changed by watching Dutch people party in the streets. To oversimplify: I understood how very puritan my US upbringing had been, and that understanding changed my feeling of belonging to and alienation from local library board of trustees meetings where people present priggish arguments to ban or censor books. So, I want to ask you what the lens of a festival allows you to understand: what are the contours of the feelings of festivals for you, and how does that multiplicity, or the tension created between those different feelings, form a part of your poetics?

MIA YOU: This question perfectly summarizes the ambivalence in this collection, this account of living that this “festival” aims to dramatize. Like you, when I first moved to the Netherlands, I was struck by how much the Dutch like to party—but specifically, and to put it more plainly, how much consumer culture has become ritualized and sacred here. The title Festival initially began as a joke: everything in the Netherlands gets turned into a festival. Philosophy Festival. Food Truck Festival. Techno Festival. Cello Festival. Governmental Budget Festival. Several of the poems in the collection were actually commissioned by such festivals. Even this notion that there always have to be some poets doing something to the side somewhere, while you’re enjoying your beer and empanadas at the Food Truck Festival, is part of the Dutch ritualization of conspicuous consumption. 

I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong. There’s a romantic aversion to poetry-on-demand, but at least then the economy is clear, and you can still try to make the whole thing a little messy for everyone. You invited me because you thought a poet would be cute, but guess what? I’m messy! That’s part of why the poems in this book are so long and weird. Poetry is a space still open to us to make things (such as our routines, conventions, rituals, ideologies) really messy. Or rather, to unfix our fixed ideas. Friedrich Nietzsche might call this the “transvaluation of all values.” Or Stephen Best might say, “Keep it moving!” 

I think people like the messy, the awkward, the long-winded, the difficult, the ambivalent more than our current regulatory, gatekeeping systems allow. Festivals are a heightened test scenario for what do we all really want? Confronting, interrogating, pulling apart—and maybe eventually hoping for some way to reconcile—my attachments versus my commitments is what poetry permits me. 

So I’ll say yes to your festival, but I won’t write a poem that will make someone sip from their drink and say, “Hm, that’s nice.” I want people to spit out their drink and go, “What the fuck?!” And then laugh. Or leave. Sometimes I’d get an invitation and think, “What made you think I would be a good person to write a poem about Bach? Actually, maybe I could be a good person to write a poem about Bach …” Anyway, there are worse things than poetry that could be happening at your festival.

I love what you’re saying about the amalgamation of feeling, purpose, and action within a festival and how that correlates to poetry. Forgive me for totally fangirling, but I am so thankful for your mind and the way you think aloud in poetry and in the world, which means that sometime back in 2021, when Twitter was still Twitter, I took a screenshot of something you wrote that more or less said this same thing, but in 280 characters, and it ended with “Sometimes poems are about getting thru to the next moment, finding a reason why you want to get thru to that next moment. That reason could be laughter rather than tears.” These two reactions rubbing elbows in the book is a part of what makes your work so compelling. That year, 2021, feels like several lifetimes ago, and your book likewise grapples with time passing. The body keeps bleeding in “Levenscyclus” (which echoes parts of your first book), and you track time through current events, like the long and slow shift from Zwarte Piet’s racist caricatures to the Sooty Pete (or Sequined Pete) in your poem’s present. Can you talk about your work as documentary? Is there a particular poetics or philosophy that underpins the way you think about time and documentary in your poems?

As a case in point about the passage of time: I don’t even remember tweeting that! But thank you for bringing it back and making it meaningful. I think I was probably reacting against the idea that every poem has to represent or establish any authentic identity, truth about the world, or moral position for the poet. I’ve always been more interested in the shifts than in the fixed. 

I moved to the Netherlands in 2014, when criticism against Zwarte Piet, the blackface sidekick of Sinterklaas (Dutch St. Nicholas), was becoming more and more prominent. This is in huge part thanks to Quinsy Gario, a brilliant artist, activist, and friend, who initiated the project Zwarte Piet Is Racisme in the early 2010s. The general cultural tide was clearly turning against this “tradition”—which literally involved people putting on blackface and dressing like they were in a bad high school production of Romeo and Juliet—and then the backlash against this shift was so shockingly violent. It was like the very essence of Dutchness was under threat. Quinsy had to go around with police protection. And even people you’d consider pretty cosmopolitan and liberal were losing their minds about having to let go of any part of their ingrained holiday celebrations. An artist I know, who lives in the center of Amsterdam (a city always priding itself in being “multicultural”), once said to me, “I know it’s an issue, but my children really seem to love Zwarte Piet, so I don’t want to take that away from them.” I was like, “Don’t put this on your little children! They have no long-standing attachment to this! It’s you!” 

It’s fascinating to me how deeply emotionally attached people can be to cultural conventions, even if they blatantly contradict their professed social values. This is true for me too (I have to consider, for example, my own investment in the family structure, while being so trigger-happy with revolutionary feminist thinking). “Fascinating” isn’t the right word. What do we call it when there’s a scab we want to scratch off, a pimple we want to see popped? I think I’m lucky I’ve always had access to poetry to think (scratch, pop) through this. I don’t know if I can call this a documentary poetics, or rather just being interested in the process, the passage, the compulsive, more than wanting the poem to have an outcome or lesson. I’m interested in autoethnography as a research mode, and I’ve always been drawn to the idea of the personal being a starting point for spiraling into the structural. I like spiraling. 

Since I moved to the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet has basically disappeared from most of the larger cities; as you mentioned, Piets usually go around now with just some “smudges of soot” on their faces. I think most people I know have let go of Zwarte Piet. But still, whenever I got involved in these discussions, I also started to see that my criticisms always produced an added layer of ambivalence, beyond Do you agree or disagree that this is racist/sexist/et cetera? There was, is, always a palpable discomfort with me, an American, being critical. Even for the Dutch, who are obsessed with US culture and politics, the US is quite obviously and undeniably an empire. The Empire. We all understand now that this is how the world sees the United States, right? So here was this collision of very weird ambivalences I found myself grappling with after moving to the Netherlands: being more marginalized and disparaged racially, while being seen as culturally arrogant and impositional; being disgusted by the conspicuous consumption of this former colonial power, meanwhile the “puritan” country where we both grew up is hugely responsible for escalating global labor and resource extraction to catastrophic levels. 

So my poetics, whether I want it or not, always has to be a poetics of deep ambivalence. I don’t know if you would agree that this aligns with your own poetics, but this ambivalence (and maybe the documentary mode giving space for that) is what I felt an affinity—or camaraderie—with while reading your Little Machines (2024). 

Oh my gosh, thank you! I usually think I’m writing toward complicity, but now I’m going to think more about ambivalence. Can we talk for a moment about translation? I wonder what you learned as a translator from having an entire book of yours translated into Dutch. 

We’ve spent two years watching a genocide live streamed through our phones, we’re constantly faced with the threats and effects of environmental collapse (whether floods or fires), the people representing us in government seem to have lost both their minds and their spines—I think the world has been arranged so that it’s very hard not to be entangled in complicity, to be writing toward complicity. 

If I had to say what this poetry collection is about, I would say it’s about being always-mediated, always-compromised, always-translated. Who I am, how I can express myself, and what effect I have on my surroundings are always also determined by my surroundings. In that sense, having the book come out first in Dutch translation, with the “original” English being its second version, makes perfect sense for these poems. There are a lot of things in the English poems I changed after seeing how Eddie Azulay, my brilliant translator, rendered them in Dutch. I say that Eddie is brilliant, and this is really not an exaggeration. Eddie is so sharp and sensitive, so musical and incisive in their lines, so joyous to be around. They are also an amazing performer. I love doing readings with them; they really up my game. Festival is the first book they’ve translated, and it’s almost impossible to believe. Some lines they made so much better than the original, and some they made different in a way I really wanted to respond to, to be actively in conversation with. They took in these poems during a period of personal grief, and I worried about that for them, but they said it was actually good to have to be in someone else’s words, world. I mean, that’s how generous and openhearted they are.

So now I am working on two translation projects, from Korean to English. One is a poetry collection from Kim Haengsook for Zephyr Press; the other is a collaborative translation, with Don Mee Choi and Helen Cho, of Kim Hyesoon’s essays, for New Directions. Both projects are really indebted to the mentorship of Don Mee, as well as how much faith the poets and their publishers are willing to put in me. It’s an undeserved gift. Through Don Mee’s guidance, and through the friendship that has emerged with Eddie, I am seeing how much translation is nourished by generosity, on multiple fronts. It’s about creating new surroundings, new circumstances, where inadvertent complicity gets converted into a deliberate community. There is a Mierle Laderman Ukeles line I use in a poem, from her “Maintenance Art Manifesto”: “After the revolution, who is going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” It’s going to be the translators. Like Pete Seeger folding up chairs after the Newport Folk Festival in A Complete Unknown (2024)—that’s the real hero of the movie, not the guy zooming away on his motorcycle. 

I’m thinking about influence, friendship, multilingualism, and repetition in the book, and wonder if the final word could be about how you see the collective—whatever that means to you—as a part of your poetics? 

The last poem in the book, which I think of as the key poem, is all about this: seeing and writing oneself in an ecology of languages, human and nonhuman lives, places, moments across lifetimes. That’s why it’s called “Levenscyclus,” or “Life Cycle.” 

I don’t know if I can say anything smart about the collective and poetics, but maybe I can say something about friendship. When I was piecing together these poems, I had three poets—who were also truly beautiful people—in mind as the constant imagined readers for this book. They were Lyn Hejinian, Nils Christian Moe-Repstad, and Pierre Alferi. They, in my mind, would see how I was responding to the bureaucratization of everyday life (it was through Lyn’s and T. J. Clark’s courses at Berkeley that I began reading the situationists, the starting point for me of thinking about the festival as political), as well as the challenge of trying to fit unwieldy bodies and politics together. They never minded lines of poetry that they didn’t understand, or that weren’t intended to be legible. They still could find them meaningful. They understood the mess.

All three passed away before the book came out. I don’t know if I can explain their influence or point out their traces in the book’s pages, and maybe they would be appalled if I did. Lyn didn’t always love everything scholars and critics said about her work. She believed in poetry more than flattery. I guess all I can do is admit I still try to see the poems through their eyes. They aren’t gone.

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Mia You is author of the poetry collections Festival (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2025) and I, too, dislike it (1913 Press, 2016), as well as the chapbooks Rouse the Ruse and the Rush (Nion Editions, 2023) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Chicago Review, Cordite Poetry Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and Poetry. She currently teaches Anglophone literature at the Universiteit Utrecht and in the critical studies program at the Sandberg Institute.

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Featured image: Photo of Mia You by Wouter le Duc.