Caroline M. Mar is a poet and high school Special Educator who lives, writes, and teaches in her hometown of San Francisco. A member of Rabble Collective, Carrie is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and an alumna of VONA. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Nimrod, Four Way Review, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and others.


Caroline, I am thrilled to feature your poems in the March 2018 Issue of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. I have been incredibly busy the last few months, and coming back to reading poetry, by starting with your work, was and is so refreshing. Thank you for trusting us with your poems.

That being said, I think I still have holidays on my mind, and especially family. I find that being one of the writers in my family, somehow has given me pressure and power to tell my stories, but also, tell the stories of my family. This is a huge responsibility—to narrate someone else’s life.

So, how does this responsibility weigh on you? And how important is it to tell your family’s stories?

Thank you so much for providing a home for these poems, and for this opportunity to talk about them.

Telling my family’s stories is hugely important to me. I think in part that’s related to the power of representation, which of course is a big topic right now, from pop culture to education (I’m a high school teacher). Part of it is that I want to center my family’s identity as a Chinese American family, and that I want to “out” most of my speakers on the page racially so that they cannot be deracinated into some kind of imagined whiteness, which happens too often in literature. Another part of it is that I simply find my family fascinating and ripe for imaginative investigation. The poems published here are part of a collection I wrote that investigates the relationship between identity, family, and teaching. My new work is still investigating family, but now from a different lens. I had two ancestors who worked on building the railroad. The railroad camps were located less than twenty miles from where I spend my summers in Lake Tahoe, possibly one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. This has opened up a whole new range of poetic opportunities for me, but yes, family stories are still central to me. Maybe it’s because I’m a history nerd and was, for a long time, a history teacher.

Responsibility feels like the right word, as do both pressure and power. On the one hand, there’s this sort of known thing about being a writer – if you tell me something weird that happened to you on your drive home, or a crazy story your childhood dog, it might end up in a poem of mine. Almost any story you tell me is fair game. That’s a tremendous power, especially with closer-to-home stories. But with “true” stories comes the pressure to tell it “right,” which I am learning to let go of. Whatever I write, someone else might think it happened very differently. Of course, it changes that dynamic a bit that in poems like “Ghost Language” and “Passing” I’m writing mostly about my grandparents, who are all dead. They can’t come yell at me for what I’ve said about them! In poems about people currently in my life, I get much more nervous – my students, say, or my wife, or my parents. Fortunately (and unfortunately), my family members are not, on the whole, readers of poetry. Just last month I shared some publications with my parents, and I was a little nervous because in one of the poems I depict a moment where I don’t think my father comes off very well, and I worried he might feel hurt by that. There was another poem that was about my teaching life that I thought would be much more legible and relatable to a non-reader of poetry that he might like. My father told me he didn’t get the legible poem at all but liked the other two, and didn’t mention the moment I was worried about at all. So if there’s pressure about this stuff from my inner critic, it’s probably not the pressure I should be listening to!


I love how these poems discuss race and culture. You aren’t heavy-handed with the discourse; rather, you allow your narrative writing to address the social context. Your poem, “Ghost Language” exemplifies your ability to both, story-tell and present rhetoric—as well as, captive readers with dynamic and engaging characters.

Thus, how do you create this duality in your writing—one that is poetic and one that is prosaic?

Thank you for saying this – I think I should probably send this to my MFA supervisors with a thank-you note! This is something I have worked really hard on, and perhaps the craft issue I still struggle with most. When I started writing poems – and I mean like when I was a child – I was always writing with a drive to address social context. Writing is a means of communication, and for me what I most often want to communicate about is some kind of discomfort, and that is often a social or political discomfort. Thus, my poems can get very prosaic, very rhetorical, and very lecturing. Sometimes I have to work to remember that I’m not writing an argumentative essay. The first poem I remember writing was for a school lesson on the Japanese internment. I was later invited to read it at a poetry reading – a real, grown-up reading, by a poet friend of my mother’s. It was an amazing opportunity, and let me know that poetry could be about really painful and political issues. I also definitely had yelling (in ALL CAPS) in the poem. I hadn’t quite hit that balance yet. I jokingly mentioned my MFA supervisors before, but it’s true that this was one of the main conversations I was having with them as a student – how to tell the stories I wanted to tell in ways that were still beautiful on page and that engaged a reader on multiple levels.

Honestly, the best way I do this is by giving myself space and time for a lot of revision. “Ghost Language” was a poem I wrote the beginnings of in 2011, and it was much more straightforward – my paternal Chinese grandfather with dementia, my maternal white grandmother with Alzheimer’s, my students who used the n-word constantly, and boom, at the end, my grandmother’s gonna say Chinaman right to my face. So I had some sense of the narrative threads, and the arc of the story, but I couldn’t figure out how to complicate it. I tried it in different line lengths, stanza sizes, writing more, writing less. I threw it out completely for a while. The ghost thing didn’t come up until 2016, when I was looking at my manuscript and thinking about which poems needed to get the ax. I loved the core of the poem, but not the poem itself, and I realized that my grandfather – who really did start talking to hallucinations he was having of dead people at the end of his life – had offered me the final thread I was missing. So that was… five years. It took me five years to figure out the balance on that one. Luckily, they don’t all take that long!


Back in 2013, I was lucky to meet one of my favorite writers, A. Van Jordan. I just finished reading M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, and was still feeling sorta “high” off his poems. His work was structured unlike any poems I had read before, and his ability to navigate someone’s life, while presenting his own, still awes me.

In your poem, “Passing, after A. Van Jordan”, you utilize some of that similar structure, but you also navigate through the lives of others, as well as, your own experiences. In what ways has A. Van Jordan, and other writers, inspired this poem and any of your other works?

I loved M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A. Yes, clearly, that was the body of Van’s work that influenced this particular poem, which I wrote soon after reading the book. I read it before I met him, but he is on the faculty at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson, and so I was lucky enough to get to attend his lectures and readings. I was able to take a class with him on Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen, which was a fantastic class, especially because Brooks’s later work was already a huge influence on me, but I had not yet read Annie Allen. Van clearly taught me a lot both from his own work and as a reader of others’ poems. Sometimes I read something that just blows my mind, and I want to experiment and play with what I see that writer doing, and try to adapt it to my own style – clearly that is what I did after reading M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A. I also knew that I wasn’t going to be able to do things the way Van had, but if I could find a way to take that spark into my own poem, I would be very lucky. When writing about my maternal grandfather in “Passing,” it helped that I think he personally would have loved the dictionary-definition form. He and my grandmother gave me a dictionary once as a birthday gift. The poem wouldn’t have worked, or at least would have functioned very differently, had I been writing about someone else. When I feel stuck about a poem, I’ll think about poets I love and go back and read them, and see if something they are doing formally feels like it might help me find new ways to say it.


Lastly, your culture and ancestry are presented in these poems in numerous and remarkable ways—sometimes using language and other times using social and personal history. In a way, your poems are coming of age stories about a narrator searching for her identity in the world and in her family—and also, in the places where family, culture, world, and the self intersect.

So, how do you think your identity is woven into these poems? Does the narrator find herself or is she still searching between opposing cultures? And what advice might you offer to readers who find themselves struggling with their racial or cultural identity?

I think identity will always be an obsession for me. Maybe it’s because I’m mixed, or because I work with teenagers, whose purpose in life is essentially to find themselves, that I focus on this so much. As a mixed-race person, particularly one who looks ethnically ambiguous, I’ve spent a lot of my life getting asked, “What are you?” Problematic framing aside, I think that question opened up in me a curiosity about what anyone is. In the yet-to-be-published collection of poems these four poems come from, Special Education, I don’t know that I’d say the speaker finds herself, exactly. I think she is eventually able to recognize the limits of the places she’s forced to align herself: Chinese, American, mixed, woman, queer, teacher, and so on. She finds a way to be comfortable with the discomforts of identity, which I think is important for all of us. Too much comfort with those constructs is what allows complicity in structures like white supremacy.

For those readers struggling to feel comfort, or seen at all, in their racial or cultural identity, I think I’d say don’t worry, everyone feels that way, because race is a stupid social construct designed to destabilize our relationships with other humans. And then my teenage students would roll their eyes at me! No, in truth, I think non-mixed folks aren’t confronted with the limits of racialization in the same way “monoracial” folks (especially white folks, of course) are. So for my mixed family out there, I’d say: find your people. In my case that was actually pretty easy growing up in the Bay Area, but when I went to college I had quite a culture shock, and finding a mixed and queer family was crucial to my continued development. Also, read! Read as many people as you can, and learn from them. In my last semester of grad school, my supervisor looked at my reading list and noted that I had done a lot to read non-white poets, especially Black poets. I was so proud of my anti-imperialist, building-my-own-canon self, and he acknowledged that. Then he asked why I had read not one single Asian or Asian-American poet in the past 18 months, and I was like, oh crap. And then I did a whole bunch more reading and learning. We can never read enough, know enough, learn enough – that humility keeps me curious about what I still have to learn about myself and about poetry.









































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