A Sense of Purpose: A Conversation With NC Youth Poet Laureate Rishi Janakiraman
In this interview, NC Youth Poet Laureate Rishi Janakiraman discusses youth poetry anthologies, literary criticism, and more.
Rishi Janakiraman seeks to engage with an ever-expanding literary community, envisioning spaces where complexity, nuance, and innovation can better thrive. Between his leadership positions such as North Carolina Youth Poet Laureate, his editorial practice as the editor-in-chief of Polyphony Lit, and his own prolific publications of poetry and literary criticism, Janakiraman has fostered a great involvement with youth poetry circles.
I was excited to dive into his perspective on what these various roles have entailed for him. Further, I was fascinated by his views of the inner workings of the current youth poetry scene. Janakiraman provides a much needed awareness—both for young poets and the organizations surrounding them—of where the literary world today can move forward.
You were recently named the inaugural North Carolina Youth Poet Laureate, as well as the National Student Poet of the Southeast. I want to first congratulate you on these achievements, and ask: What have these experiences been like for you?
Thank you so much, and before I get into answering, I have to thank you again for taking the time to feature young poets for Writer’s Digest. It’s a very meaningful experience to be invited into a space that has for so long shaped literary conversation, and to be welcomed there so thoughtfully.
Being named North Carolina’s inaugural Youth Poet Laureate has been another moment of entering—and attempting to change—a living literary space. In May, I remember my first performance as a state laureate at the Governor’s Mansion, and how—with increasing fear—I watched and applauded furiously with each succeeding laureate. I would, of course, be performing at the end, in front of an audience of high school youth laureates, regional laureates, the adult state laureate (Jaki Shelton Green), and the first lady of NC. Definitely, definitely, one of the most terrifying days of my life. But the audience really enjoyed my poem, and a few talked to me after to compliment my imagery or tell me how they related to it.
My experience with laureateship has generally followed a similar arc: a tremendous amount of fear, followed by relief, followed by a sense of joy that someone out there, some audience member or workshop participant, heard what I had to say and connected with it. A lot of my work as a YPL involves leading poetry workshops, too, and so far I’ve helped middle schoolers recite their work and high schoolers write ekphrasis as a part of my laureateship. Seeing so many people who enjoy poetry, who love to see it performed and written and interpreted, has really given me a sense of purpose—I think laureateship has made me move away from this idea that poetry has to be an isolated kind of effort, and toward the idea that poetry’s existence is fundamentally shaped by how it’s read and received.
As for being the National Student Poet of the Southeast, though the role is still beginning, it’s an equally rewarding experience. The youth writing circuit is pretty tight-knit, so I’ve looked up to former national student poets for quite a while, and I’m very grateful for NSPP. The four other NSPs—shoutout to Nadyne, Cordelia, Sophie, and Demarion—and I have become close; we’re slated to teach some workshops pretty soon!
You’ve also taken on the role of editor-in-chief for Polyphony Lit, an international volunteer-run literary magazine dedicated to platforming high school students. What is your philosophy as an editor curating work from such a wide variety of perspectives?
Polyphony Lit’s most distinctive feature is that every submission, whether accepted or rejected, is sent back a written piece of commentary by an editor that provides thoughtful feedback on the work in question. I think that policy has undoubtedly shaped the way I view editing as a negotiation between the author and the editor. There’s this prevailing idea I formerly subscribed to (shared by no less than Toni Morrison herself) that good editors are “dispassionate,” that they see the work as an impersonal, intentless field onto which they project their own criticisms.
I don’t deny that there’s merit to this view, but it risks framing editing as this kind of blind intervention into a piece that foregrounds editorial over authorial intent. That, in my view, can be discouraging at best and dangerous at worst: What if the way I’d like to rephrase something simply discords with the style of the work in question? What if a cohesively intentional piece ends up being better than an over-edited, territorialized one? What if the author of the piece ends up questioning the original maxims of their own style in favor of mine? In my view, a good editor is able to distinguish between “what the work wants to be” and “what I wish the work were,” simply out of courtesy for the author’s identity as a writer.
When I was working as a junior, senior, and later executive editor at Polyphony, what was always constant was this self-consciousness, the knowledge that somewhere along the line, the writer of this submission was going to read what I had to say about it. They don’t know me, and they possibly never will, but they’ll always have my written piece of commentary. Polyphony’s editing policy made me conscious of how my own idea of the best version of a given piece might totally clash with the submission author’s—it made the value of preserving authorial intent brilliantly clear. I realized that good editorship, contrary to Morrison’s belief, might just be about bringing yourself as close as possible to the author, recognizing the effort they’re trying to undertake, and helping them realize their own vision instead of yours.
As a writer, you engage deeply with both poetry and literary criticism. What first sparked your interest in these areas, and how does the divergence—or overlap—of these disciplines inform your voice?
Both of my interests in these areas started with reading. My interest in poetry started with the work I was reading in class like Langston Hughes and Frank O’Hara, after which I branched out into more contemporary voices like Terrance Hayes, Anne Carson, and Victoria Chang. With criticism, I’d say I started out hearing the phrase “panopticon” mentioned somewhere in an essay, reading deeper into Foucault, and then discovering that realm of late-20th-century French theory, with Derrida and Lacan following suit.
A lot of my time reading and writing poetry has led me to the conclusion that a poem doesn’t really have one mode of existence, but many, many overlapping ones. And I think literary criticism—and all the distinctly different critical lenses we study to make sense of literature—are indispensable in parsing through these individual modes. You hear a lot of people saying, especially now, that all art is political and that the political meaning of art can’t be overstated—which is absolutely true—but the “political” mode of existence any given poem has is just one cloud in the several overlapping ones that constitute it. You can of course read a confessional poet like Sylvia Plath in terms of the postwar political context, especially with respect to how she very often casts oppressive figures in her work (often linked to her father/husband) as Nazis. But you can also understand her poetry psychoanalytically in terms of her fixation on the deceased father as a cause for a deep-seated fear of abandonment.
These two readings don’t cancel each other out—in fact, they coexist beautifully—but the utility of literary criticism is that it allows us to locate a poem in all of its individual states, whether that’s biographical, formalistic, political, or something else entirely. When I think of my own voice, it’s often that my interpretation of poems, and my view of my own poetry, is always informed by an overlapping set of the literary schools of thought I’ve read about. I’d say I see literary criticism as an instrument to better understand poetry, one that allows us to make sense of how such an internally and externally complex medium occupies many spaces at once.
You’ve criticized what you half-ironically describe as the “teen writing industrial complex,” referring to the growing pressure on young writers to cater to the tastes of certain journals or competitions. How would you describe the institutionalization of the youth writing world today? Do you see movements such as self-critiquing “meta-poetry” as a subversion or extension of this culture?
I think it’s useful to begin by acknowledging that there is by-and-large a fairly coherent apparatus for “getting involved in writing” as a young person, and that’s generally a good thing. A teenager who comes to writing today is likely to encounter the same constellation almost immediately: She’ll comb through the Scholastic gallery and all the YoungArts anthologies in the past five years, scroll through submission trackers populated with the same rotating list of competitions (among them, Bennington, Nancy Thorp, Narrative, Foyle Young Poets); aspire to summer intensives like IYWS and Kenyon; create an informal canon for herself with the small circuit of other heavily-decorated teen writers she’s read.
I’ve been in that place before, and I recognize the comfort of it, in this sense that “good writing” is something that can be learned through careful attention, through reading the right poems closely enough, and through later absorbing their gestures and imitating them. But because young writers will naturally come to recognize their literary merit only through these external institutions, they are instructed to become good by specifically internalizing the thematic and formal content of the work that’s most frequently rewarded, such that the award-winning poems are immediately subsumed as exemplars in the teen writing canon. The small subset of youth competitions, then, exert a tremendous influence on the style of teen writers at large: If there’s, say, a large-scale effort to feature themes of politically-legible writing in a particular cycle, you can pretty confidently expect to see more young people drifting towards those subjects, or drifting toward a particular kind of confessional posture that seems to attract judges.
My criticism of the industrial complex is that these youth writing institutions have come to occupy a really outsized role in determining the style and content of teen writing. But, as you point out, there’s been a movement of teen writers now conscious of this influence and who express their disdain for it in meta-poetry: We’ve seen, in recent years, an influx of poetry that deliberately critiques how (predominantly white) editorship often rewards any and all diasporic work in a contrived effort to appear “inclusive.” The critique can be explicit, like in Hans Yang’s “For Scholastic,” in which the speaker names the prize, the judge, the editorial room. It’s an obviously subversive poem, and critical meta-poetry like this is, on its face, a subversive kind of undertaking that directly opposes its establishment.
But, interestingly, it’s just as easily co-optable by these institutions themselves, often without resulting in any material change beyond just publishing self-criticism. I think of Chloe Wong’s really incisive meta-critical piece that won YoungArts a few years back—a meta-poem like hers that names its prize and lampoons its judge can genuinely unsettle readers, but it can also be repurposed as a neat bit of evidence that the journal “listens,” leaving it absolved of any responsibility simply by publishing a meta-critical piece. The difference between subversion and absorption, in my view, has a lot to do with that institutional response (or lack thereof): Critique has teeth only when it results in something like an editorial change that actually alters selection processes. Until that happens, it seems like meta-poetry will continue to do a kind of double work—exposing the machine while supplying it with new, flashy parts—and the only way to make its critique lasting is to make institutions change what they value, not just how they look when they applaud the complaint.
In an essay for Eucalyptus Lit, you suppose that an important change in the youth literary ethos “might be to expand the category of ‘important’ work beyond what is recognizably painful.” What would you recommend for young writers creating poems that are joyful, lighthearted, or surreal—or otherwise atypical within prevailing literary institutions?
In all honesty, it’s something I’m still trying to achieve myself. We’re so often taught, in almost every arena in which our writing is judged, that trauma or pain connotes importance or even merit; a poem that’s joyful, or that strays in any way outside the grim confessional tone we expect from young writers, is coded as lacking in craft. I’m not going to deny that the writing world can be painful, that the world in general is painful, and that every artist experiences pain and has the right to translate it into the medium of their choice, but when the youth literary ethos is predicated on exclusively privileging trauma-based literature, it again exerts an unnecessary pressure on teen writing as a whole. If I read a selected anthology of youth and feel more depressed after every poem, I’m naturally more poised to write about my pain, simply because I desire recognition and reception for my own work, and the best way to ensure that is to mimic what’s clearly well-received by the editors.
That kind of cycle applies to everyone, and it’s a very natural thing. The remedy for it, then, is exposure to newly-thematic work. Something that’s especially important for any young writer right now, I think, is being aware that there’s poetry that exists outside of what’s awarded or recognized by these institutions. When I was younger, I felt like I couldn’t even imagine what a joyful or lighthearted poem would look like, so I consequently never wrote one; poetry was so bound up with trauma that it seemed impossible to even think of a poem that wasn’t trauma-based. Imagination, I think, is the necessary condition for writing—to have the impetus to write something, you must first believe it’s possible to write it. The work that needs to be done, or the support that needs to be given, involves expanding what young writers think is possible by exposing them to different kinds of creative work.
That responsibility is of course shared by institutions themselves. If we had competitions that had a broad, multi-style selection of pieces each cycle, most of the problems we’re seeing right now would be entirely resolved. But there’s already a precedent—competitions aren’t like that—and it seems that young writers still do love to write about their pain. More than just institutionally-mediated exposure, I think a small part of that responsibility rests on young writers themselves, people who are free to choose what they read, and therefore free to choose whatever may influence them. To put it simply, maybe instead of reading a YoungArts anthology, more teen writers should read Mary Oliver—and be reminded that attentiveness, joy, and wonder are all equally valid forms of seriousness. After all, the best way to think something is possible is to see someone else doing it excellently.
